StageCraft
The Journal
Sightlines and Risers: A Beginner's Guide for Community Theatre
Why the back row always seems to have the worst seat in the house, and a practical method for figuring out how tall your risers actually need to be.
Blocking 101: Reading and Writing a Stage Grid
Stage directions like upstage-left and downstage-right only make sense once you understand where they come from — here's how to read a blocking grid and use one to record your own show.
Building a Rehearsal Schedule That Actually Gets You to Opening Night
A weekly rehearsal calendar looks simple until you try to fit every scene, every actor's availability, and a tech week into it — here's a method for splitting your hours sensibly.
Gels, Color Temperature, and Stage Lighting Basics
Why your LED fixtures look a different color than your old fresnels, what a mired shift actually is, and how to pick a correction gel without a professional lighting designer on staff.
How to Budget Props for a Community Theatre Production
Prop costs have a way of creeping past what you planned for — a practical approach to listing, pricing, and protecting your production's prop budget from surprises.
The Page-a-Minute Rule: Estimating Your Show's Runtime
Directors have used a simple rule of thumb to estimate a script's stage time for decades — where it comes from, when it breaks down, and how to use it responsibly.
Stage Directions Explained: Upstage, Downstage, and Everything Between
A plain-language reference for the handful of terms — stage left, downstage, apron, wings — that every actor and crew member needs before their first rehearsal.
Planning a Production From Five Numbers
A production plan can be sketched in an evening from five figures, and having them early changes decisions that are expensive to change later.
Blocking Notation That Survives a Handover
Blocking notes are useless if they cannot be read back three weeks later. The common failure is not laziness — it is that "moves left" and "crosses to the…
Prop Budgets, Contingency, and Where the Money Hides
Prop budgets are small enough that people plan them in their heads and large enough that being wrong is a problem. Writing them down takes ten minutes and…
Gel Correction Is Measured in Mireds, Not Kelvin
Colour temperature does not behave the way the Kelvin numbers suggest. The gap between 3200 K and 3400 K looks small and is visible; the gap between 6000 K…
Rehearsal Time Is a Budget — Divide It First
Rehearsal time feels abundant at the start of a process and runs out at the end, which is a sign it was never counted. It is a fixed budget, and it can be…