Personal Narrative: Live Musical Theatre

An experience one goes through can build character, destruct, change the way we see future scenarios, or be life-altering. Sometimes we are placed in situations where we simply do not thrive. Other times we are crafted and molded into a better version of ourselves. The latter of the two describes a personal experience where I was presented the opportunity to manage all production aspects of a spring musical at my high school. Learning to manage every facet of a live musical theatre show created many obstacles. This opportunity has revealed certain strengths and weaknesses, has aided in preparing for future leadership roles, and rightfully reassured that technical theatre is just as important as performance theatre.
Initiative is defined as “the ability to assess and initiate things independently,” and that is precisely what I was expected to do as production manager. At times, it was daunting scrambling to make endless amounts of copies, beg for costume fees from actors, design a playbill, monitor a technical crew, et cetera. Luckily, with each …show more content…
Though I rest assured I tried and did my best in the tasks I had to complete as production manager, there were also areas for improvement. The show performed included a very large cast which means more people to watch over, more people to inform, more money to keep up with, more people to check on, so on and so forth. Production manager has a hidden job responsibility: babysitting. I had to constantly check on the actors while the director was directing. I do not like immaturity, nor do I handle it particularly well, and all actors are not promised to be delivered mature. I found it very difficult at times to not want to chop a person’s head off if they weren’t doing what was asked of them. Due to this hindrance, I became impatient at times. I have learned through this process that it is almost always best to take a deep breath and think before