About StageCraft

Putting on a show with a volunteer cast, a borrowed hall, and a weekend build crew means a hundred small pieces of arithmetic land on whoever is willing to do them. How tall does the back riser need to be so the last row can actually see the stage floor? How many rehearsal hours are really available before opening night, and how should they be split across scenes? What gel do you tape over that fixture to warm it up to match the others? Will the props budget stretch to cover everything on the list? How long is this script actually going to run once it’s on its feet? None of these questions are hard on their own — they just take longer than they should when you’re doing them by hand between rehearsals.

StageCraft exists to take that arithmetic off a director or stage manager’s plate. Instead of long guides you have to read end to end, the site is built around a set of small, single-purpose calculators, each aimed at one real task. The Sightline & Riser Calculator works out how much each row of raked or platformed seating needs to step up so every seat clears the head of the row in front. The Rehearsal Scheduler splits the rehearsal hours you actually have between now and opening night across your scenes, in proportion to how much stage time each one needs. The Lighting Gel Color Temperature Calculator works out the mired shift between two light sources and suggests roughly how strong a correction gel to reach for. The Prop Budget Planner adds up your prop list with a contingency built in, so nobody discovers the overage a week before tech. The Script Runtime Timer estimates how long a script will run on stage from its page count, using the page-per-minute rule directors have relied on for decades. And the Blocking Grid Generatorturns your stage’s width and depth into a labelled grid you can print and write blocking notes onto.

Beyond the calculators, the blog and learnsection cover the reasoning behind the numbers — how a sightline is actually calculated, why the page-a-minute rule works as well as it does, what a mired shift is — and the Stagecraft Heritage Museumis a browsable collection of theatre masks, historic playhouses, commedia dell’arte, and puppetry traditions from around the world, with every entry, image, and fact drawn from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

A few things worth stating plainly. StageCraft is an independent site, not affiliated with any theatre company, licensing house, or drama school. It is supported by advertising, which is how the tools stay free with no account required. Every result the tools produce — a riser height, a rehearsal split, a gel recommendation, a budget total, a runtime estimate, a grid layout — is a general estimate built on the numbers you enter and on common stagecraft conventions, not a substitute for a qualified lighting designer, production manager, or building-code review where safety or accessibility is at stake. If something looks off in a tool or an article, or you think a calculator is missing that would help, the contact page is the place to say so.