Paperwork

A Quick Note About Paperwork

Before we jump into it, let’s stop for a second and talk about paperwork. It would be easy to give you a template and send you out into the world, but that’s not the way to learn to be a stage manager.

Stage management is not about how things have always been done; it is about what works, and what’s right for you. I can’t encourage you enough to develop your own paperwork templates to really make stage management your own.

It’s so refreshing to look at several different prompt books and be able to recognize every stage manager’s distinct style, as opposed to seeing how everyone used the same formats.

These examples are NOT “templates” for you to copy. Sure––nothing is stopping you from making a copy and using it. But building your own from scratch, even if you decide to use these for reference, will serve you so much better––you want your paperwork to work the way your brain works, as long as it is also understandable to the director.

That said, let's jump in!