San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Stage manager worked behind scenes for decades
In the last performances of “A Christmas Carol” at San Francisco’s Geary Theater before COVID-19 hit in 2020, Milt Commons was the dresser who ensured that costuming for the more than half-dozen boys in the cast went without a hitch.
It was eight shows a week and the nights were long, but Commons kept up with the kids, seeing to it that they all had their mittens and hats before taking the stage. He had something to prove. He was 92.
His was the life of a stage manager and a dresser, backstage jobs that Commons filled for nearly 70 years, after figuring out there were more paying jobs out of the spotlight than in it.
He would have worked for 72 or 73 years, but the COVID-19 lockdown put him into early retirement after a career that went all the way back to Broadway productions starring Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston and Jean Stapleton.
Commons suffered a stroke March 19 after attending a pancake breakfast at Old St. Mary’s Cathedral, where he had long served as stage manager of the Old Cathedral Players. Witty until
the end, he wanted to make sure that his final words were “places, please,” as if he were still backstage, said his longtime friend and caregiver Joanie Juster.
He died in an assisted care facility on Nov. 6. He was 96.
“Milt was the ultimate theater professional. He lived and breathed it,” said Juster, who met Commons during a production
of “Greater Tuna” in 1987. “He took great pride in being part of the grand tradition that is theater.”
Though he worked some of the biggest stages in America, he also worked some of the smallest. None were smaller than the productions in his hometown of Macksville, Kan., population 471.
His first show was as an actor in a melodrama in Colorado in 1950. From there it was summer stock and regional theaters.
Within seven years he had climbed all the way to sharing a bill with Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall, at a show on Long Island. But he was a realist and understood that he might get no closer than that to the bright lights of Broadway.
The odds of steady work were more in his favor as a stage manager, so he made the switch.
“I really didn’t know what a stage manager was until I became one,” he told Chronicle theater critic Lily Janiak in a 2020 interview in the lobby of his Nob Hill apartment building, where he’d lived since 1974.
He described the job as “a combination of a kindergarten teacher and a ringmaster.”
He moved to San Francisco in 1974 but found his steadiest work as a stage manager in Los Angeles, at the Mark Taper Forum and El Teatro Campesino. In San Francisco, he worked at ACT, the Magic Theatre and at Word for
Word, the literary troupe that puts works of fiction on the stage, as actors recite every word of the text.
He was 79 when he took on the job of stage manager for “4 Adverbs,” a show of four short stories by Daniel Handler, staged in 2006. It involved a heavy set piece nicknamed “Gigantour,’ which had to be moved around the stage during the show, and Commons did not foist this duty onto the younger crew.
“Milt took charge and knew exactly where Gigantour had to be,” said the show’s director, Sheila Balter. “He made sure that everything about the show was precisely on target.”
Each night the cast and crew left around 11 p.m., and Commons would have been headed to the nearest Muni stop to catch the bus if Balter had not offered him a ride in her old twodoor Honda Civic.
“At first he was pretty gruff and standoffish,” she said. “By the end of the run I adored him, to the point that I wanted to make a documentary film to celebrate his amazing life and career, but I never did.”
Milton Donald Commons was born June 17, 1927, in Macksville, a farming town where his dad was a pharmacist who ran the town drugstore. It had a soda fountain, and Milt displayed early talent in creating window displays, according to his sister, Carol Commons Ladbury. He also had the less glamorous duty of hauling in blocks of ice and chipping them for the sodas. His mother was a schoolteacher who also worked at the drugstore.
At Macksville High School, Commons played drums in the marching band and became the drum major, while also acting in school plays. He graduated in 1945 and came west to UC Santa Barbara because he heard it had a theater department.
But the cost was prohibitive and his parents convinced him to transfer back to the University of Kansas, where he earned a bachelor’s in English education, and a master’s in drama, in 1950.
That same year he was cast in a melodrama in Cripple Creek, Colo. It was an itinerant life, with productions in Phoenix, Hollywood, Maine, New York and Minneapolis, where he spent five years stage managing at the Guthrie Theater, one of the largest regional stages in the country. These productions were interspersed with visits to his Aunt Bernice in San Francisco.
He got lucky in finding his first apartment, which became his last apartment: a rent-controlled thirdfloor studio across from the Ritz-Carlton. The monthly rent was $150 in 1974 and is still under $1,000.
Over the years Commons’ apartment became “a theatrical museum,” said Juster. “It was filled with show posters and playbills and programs from every show he had seen or worked on for 70some odd years.”
During a three-year run of the surprise hit “Greater Tuna,” at the Mason Street Theater, Commons served as stage manager while Juster was house manager. They were the first to arrive each night and the last to leave, after turning on the ghost light onstage, a theatrical tradition.
“He taught me about professionalism,” Juster said, “taking every part of the job seriously and doing it correctly so you could put on the best possible show every night.”
Commons’ stage notes were so precise that an entire performance could be re-created just by reading his notes, which were handwritten. He never learned how to use a computer.
Ever practical, Commons could foresee himself aging out of stage managing work, so in his 70s he downscaled his job description to dresser. Rather than have to learn email as a stage manager, he learned to sew and joined the wardrobe union, dressing performers at American Conservatory Theater, BroadwaySF’s Golden Gate Theatre and San Francisco Opera, among others, along the way becoming the oldest active member of the wardrobe union, Local 784.
Whether stage manager or dresser, he approached every performance the same way.
“You never know when you’ve done your last show,” he told Janiak in 2020, after he had taken his own professional final bow. “And the reverse of that is that you’ve got to do every show as if it were your last one.”