THINGS YOU ONLY KNOW IF YOU’RE A... Stage manager

Alex Duffy, stage manager, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

A stage manager makes sure everything you see and hear happens each night – and on cue

“We are the ones that deliver the production and help coordinate it for every performance. We’re a team of eight. A big part of the stage management role is to ‘call’ the production; we call all the cues that make things happen on stage so things look crisp and precise, like magic is happening before your eyes.”

A two-part show like Cursed Child has a lot of cues

“The way the show has been programmed, there are 2,692 lighting changes, and we call 600 of those. There’s 15,221 sound cues, and 552 of those are called. For [scenery] automation, there are 237 moves.”

It takes a lot of rehearsal to ensure Potter-worthy magic happens

“We rehearse as much as the cast do. We rehearsed for five months before we opened… Everything is called to within a millisecond so there’s consistency across the show. The second we start to forget how important that precision is, we run the risk of maybe a trick being revealed, and that’s against the show’s creed.”

Cursed Child is a well-oiled machine, but live theatre is always living

“I think being a really effective stage manager for a show like this is being able to respond to the variables and slight changes every night, either in a piece of equipment responding differently, or a cast member giving us a slightly different version of what we rehearsed, and still trying to make that make sense in the world of Harry Potter. I’m most proud when things go slightly not to plan but we’re able to respond to that and still deliver the show.”

There’s always a plan B.

“For everything that happens on stage, and for every cue that happens, we’ve drawn up a set of contingency plans. It’s a 30-page document that I wrote with the involvement of our creative team and technical heads of departments. So for every single moment – if something doesn’t work, if a piece of equipment fails on us, or there’s a delay of some kind – we have a plan in place.” Ben Neutze

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Princess Theatre, 163 Spring St, Melbourne 3000. 03 9299 9800. harrypottertheplay.com/au. $65-$175 per part. Until Jul 12.