{"id":6535,"date":"2013-03-04T12:56:29","date_gmt":"2013-03-04T17:56:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/?p=6535"},"modified":"2014-01-25T18:09:57","modified_gmt":"2014-01-25T23:09:57","slug":"one-short-day-inside-broadways-emerald-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/?p=6535","title":{"rendered":"\u2018One Short Day\u2019 inside Broadway\u2019s Emerald City"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"121220_wicked_hamerman_116\"<\/a><\/p>\n

On stage in New York City\u2019s Gershwin Theatre, Glinda and Elphaba\u2014the star witches of the Wizard of Oz<\/em>-inspired musical Wicked<\/em>\u2014sing and prance their way through the Emerald City. Green lights flash in time with cymbal crashes. Actors in outrageous costumes high-kick, handspring, and bicycle across the stage. Giant scenery glides back and forth as hundreds of tiny marquee lights flicker.<\/p>\n

Inside a cramped black booth some 15 feet above the action, Christy Ney \u201999<\/strong> flips light switches and taps her feet and fingers in time to the music below, speaking quiet commands into a microphone headset. Her words are broadcast throughout the theater to a host of behind-the-scenes people: carpenters, electricians, a spotlight caller, automated scenery runners. From inside the booth, it winds up sounding like this:<\/p>\n

Cast, on stage: \u201cOne short day in the Emerald city\u2014\u201d
\nNey, into headset: \u201cLights 156.5\u2014go.\u201d
\nCast: \u201cOne short day, full of so much to do.\u201d
\nNey: \u201cLights 158.5\u2014go.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat people don\u2019t get to see,\u201d Ney muses during a brief break, \u201cis that while the cast is performing on stage, I\u2019m also doing my own little performance up here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Christy<\/a>
Christy Ney \u201999 and Marybeth Abel, production stage manager for “Wicked,” run lighting and technical cues before a show<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As the blockbuster musical\u2019s assistant stage manager, Ney is charged with orchestrating the look, sound, and feel of Wicked<\/em>. \u201cThe purpose of this job,\u201d she says, \u201cis to make sure those three aspects stay exactly as the creators intended.\u201d It\u2019s no small undertaking, considering this show opened nearly a decade ago, and no small responsibility, considering it has been the highest-grossing Broadway production every year since. (Lest you suspect Wicked<\/em>\u2019s blockbuster status is fading, note that it set a new Broadway box-office record just one week before this performance, grossing $2,947,172 between Christmas and New Year\u2019s Eve.)<\/p>\n

From her hidden perch on the theater\u2019s far left side, Ney cues actor entrances, lights, scenery changes, and even sound effects. \u201cWe run the show,\u201d she says of herself and the show\u2019s other stage managers, who are currently stationed on the left and right stage wings. \u201cWe are the center point of communications for the entire production side of Wicked, or as my dad so poetically put it when he came to watch me work one day, \u2018I guess without you doing this work those actors would just look like a bunch of poops on stage.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

While this afternoon\u2019s performance runs unblemished, there have been mishaps in the past\u2014unavoidable when you\u2019re performing a live two-and-a-half-hour musical more than 400 times a year, inevitable when that musical is the special-effects-laden Wicked. In the grand tradition of theater superstitions, Ney balks when asked about past calamities while the show is underway. She\u2019s willing to discuss them a few days later over the phone.<\/p>\n

\"121220_wicked_hamerman_142\"<\/a>
“I’m really lucky,” says Ney. “I get to put on a play every day.”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There was once a debilitating brownout during the high-tech \u201cOne Short Day\u201d number. Those crucial headset connections have dropped out at times or only allowed one-way communication. The one-ton-plus Wizard of Oz<\/em> head once got stuck on stage and required five male crew members to come drag it off. \u201cWhen something like that happens, what you want to do is say, \u2018Let\u2019s just pull the curtain and stop the show,\u2019\u201d Ney says, \u201cbut really the old adage is true: The show must go on.<\/p>\n

\u201cI take calling the show extremely seriously,\u201d she adds. \u201cWhile I don\u2019t necessarily get butterflies like I did early on, I still feel a rumble all day long if I know I\u2019m going to call the show. You have to be completely \u2018on\u2019 for those three hours. You can\u2019t let your brain stray because you\u2019re in control of how everything looks and sounds, and people are counting on you. And you\u2019re up there completely alone, so I try to get enough sleep, go easy on cocktails the night before, and not eat anything too strange that day.\u201d<\/p>\n

With six evening shows and two matinees per week, Ney works long days and odd hours. Today, she arrived at the theater around noon, printed up a sheet of cast substitutions, called a building manager to see about getting the heat lowered\u2014Wicked<\/em>\u2019s smoke effects can envelop front-row audience members if the theater\u2019s temperature is off\u2014nibbled on some apple slices and spoke with each production head about those cast substitutions. After climbing a steep ladder staircase to spend three hours \u201ccalling\u201d the show from her little booth, she will climb back down and return to a windowless third-floor office\u2014it looks like a dressing room, but with laptops instead of makeup palettes\u2014to record a postshow report. Then she\u2019ll grab a quick dinner break and start the whole thing over again for the 7 p.m. performance, finally catching the bus home to Union City, NJ around 10.<\/p>\n

\"After<\/a>
After calling a show, Ney retires to her third-floor office to file a postshow report.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re working six days a week, 365 days a year,\u201d she says. \u201cThat part can be hard. You can\u2019t make it to weddings; you miss Bar Mitzvahs. Saturdays are the longest. I leave the house at 11 a.m., and I\u2019m not home until 11:30 p.m. But I\u2019m also really lucky. I get to put on a play every day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though she doesn\u2019t do a lot of it in her stage-managing role, Ney says that she \u201cpopped out of the womb singin\u2019 and dancin\u2019.\u201d At 3 \u00bd, she asked her mother to enroll her in dance classes. A few years later, she saw her first live performance\u2014a touring production from the kids\u2019 TV show The Magic Garden<\/em>\u2014and around age 9, her first stage musical: a local high school\u2019s production of Grease<\/em>. \u201cI remember just being totally blown away,\u201d she says of the latter. \u201cThey had a real car up there on stage! I was thinking, \u2018I know this show isn\u2019t real, but that car is real.\u2019 It was simultaneously confusing and exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

She nurtured her love of theater as a television\/theater production major at TCNJ. In 1996, a trip with friends from TCNJ to see Rent<\/em> on Broadway left Ney in awe. \u201cI was just like this the whole time,\u201d she says, dropping her jaw and widening her eyes. \u201cThat was the show that made me want to do this job.\u201d She got her first chance to try it during a campus production of Sweeney Todd<\/em>, for which she ran the \u201cPie Shop Crew.\u201d \u201cI called the cues for when the pie shop would rotate,\u201d revealing another piece of the show\u2019s scenery. \u201cThat was really my first taste of heading anything like that. It was my first taste of, \u2018I can do this. I can manage what goes on behind the scenes.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A Playbill, signed by “Wicked” cast members, awaits a lucky fan.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After graduation, Ney moved to New York and began performing the classic struggling-artist shuffle. She temped during the day and worked as a production assistant for various shows and events at night. Eventually, she landed a job as assistant stage manager for the first national tour of The Lion King<\/em>. Four years later, just days after giving notice that she was leaving the road, a former colleague called. Would she like to come do the same job for Wicked<\/em>? It was April 2007; she\u2019s been helping to run Wicked<\/em> eight times a week ever since.<\/p>\n

Back in the Gershwin Theatre, as the actors take their final bows, Ney\u2019s above-stage show continues. She calls out more spotlight cues and, following a standing ovation, directs the house lights to spring on. Then she carefully packs away her props\u2014the headset, a bottle of water, a paper on which she\u2019s recorded that the show finished five minutes earlier than usual today\u2014and turns out each tiny light in her booth. Her own performance complete, she slings a tote bag over one shoulder and climbs back down the steep ladder steps onto the darkened stage.<\/p>\n

All photos (c) Don Hamerman.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On stage in New York City\u2019s Gershwin Theatre, Glinda and Elphaba\u2014the star witches of the “Wizard of Oz”-inspired musical “Wicked”\u2014sing and prance their way through the Emerald City. Fifteen feet above the action, Christy Ney \u201999 flips light switches and taps her feet and fingers in time to the music below, speaking quiet commands into a microphone headset. As the blockbuster musical\u2019s assistant stage manager, Ney is charged with orchestrating the look, sound, and feel of “Wicked.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":6537,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-march-2013"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6535\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}