Many agree that Haldane Drama has consistently produced professional-quality plays and musicals for decades. Although you don’t watch them sing or dance, there are some hidden players who make these shows run smoothly. Not a single scene could be actualized on the stage without Haldane Drama’s tech and stage crew.
This year, seniors Nicolo Masella and Kai Ietaka are running the sound department. Masella and Ietaka participate in tech for a variety of reasons. “I love the theater community,” said Ietaka. “I’m not one for being onstage, so this is a really good opportunity to be involved in drama club.” Masella does tech “for the love of it.” He enjoys being behind the scenes- “I’m the guy in the chair, pretty much.” Masella was inspired to experiment with the technical side of sound and music by his brother, who is a DJ. According to Masella, “The hardest part of sound is organizing who has a mic and then keeping track of who has it. In the last show, there was mic swapping between characters, and then the levels were off.” Masella believes that being in the tech scene has prepared him for working with video and cameras in college. Similarly, Ietaka expressed interest in using his skills from Haldane Drama to work on a movie set.
Senior Nicolas Lagerman is the head of the lighting department. Originally, he found the booth daunting. Lagerman stepped down after doing tech in eighth grade because of the complex, demanding workload. High school math teacher Kristen Peparo convinced him to give it another shot as a sophomore, and since then, Lagerman has “loved every show” he’s done. The graduation of Caroline Sniffen, the previous lighting manager, had a great impact on Lagerman. “She was definitely the most reliable part of our team,” he said. Since her graduation, his workload has increased, and he has taken on new responsibilities.
New tools have defined the fall play for Lagerman. He is excited by a new addition to the stage: the three moving spotlights. “We can just move them around with the mouse. Somebody could be on the stage and, in real time, I can be moving it around to follow them.” This is most helpful when an actor is standing in a spot that the fixed lights can’t reach. “Instead of having to put in a whole new light, we can just kind of be like, ‘moving light, you’re there for this scene.”
Because Lagerman bounces between lighting and sound, stepping in when he is needed, he believes that he can accurately compare the different roles. He concluded that lights are more work overall, but running sound during the performance itself is more difficult. “Lighting is harder towards the beginning, because we have long days for tech rehearsal. We have to build out the entire show. But once we get to the show, you just press the next cube button over and over,” said Lagerman. “For sound, you do basically nothing for a while, and then you really only start building stuff towards the end. Running the actual show is a lot harder because you can’t just go ‘next one, next one’. Every single show, the mics are a bit different; you have to be adjusting stuff every single scene.” Lagerman believes that the hardest part about lighting is its flexibility and subjectivity. For each show, he grapples with the challenge of bringing the director’s artistic vision to life when it was different from the light scheme he had envisioned.
While the light and sound crew make the show look and sound good, the stage crew makes sure the physical stage is set and that transitions run seamlessly. Senior Eleanor Chew is the head stage manager. Chew started doing stage crew because she wanted an extracurricular with a time commitment similar to that of sports. She was inclined to join because of her friends in theater. “I wanted to be a part of what they were doing, but I didn’t want to act onstage,” she said. Chew is now filling the shoes of her predecessor, Robert Friedmark, the long-time head manager, as well as Chew’s friend and mentor throughout Haldane Drama’s “Macbeth” and “Into the Woods.” “I definitely feel less nervous and less like I’m going to mess up something. And I feel kind of more in control,” Chew said, “I like people coming to me first for things, and not feeling like I need to report to another member, like to Robert or someone else.” Chew appreciates the collaboration with her fellow stage managers, sophomore Maria McFadden, sophomore Emma Cavanaugh, and junior Ryan Duncan. The stage crew pass time at rehearsal by taking Buzzfeed quizzes, playing Imposter, or making Pixel Art. Chew expressed complete confidence in her successors, highlighting how they take initiative without being asked. Still, she foresees the coming years solemnly: “I think they’re going to be like, devastated, and that it’s going to be way less fun around here without me. But I think somehow they will get by without me. Somehow…”
