For my last job, I had to live on a tour bus, and almost everything I Googled to try to figure out what this life would be like was pretty useless. The only thing the internet told me, on every single site about living on a tour bus, was don’t poop on the bus. (It’s…
So you’re heading out on a tour? Here are some apps I can’t live without on the road: Google Maps I love me some Waze too, but Google Maps walking function is unbeatable when you’re constantly trying to find your way around new cities. Venmo I probably use this at least a dozen times a…
A few years ago, I wrote about the financial dangers of touring. It’s really easy to turn into a spend thrift without paying attention when your life is just wandering from place to place. Lately, I’ve come to face to face with another money peril on tour. Getting sick. When you get sick at home,…
Fair warning, friends, I’m kind of in a #rant mood today. Entertainment is a really weird gig. I’m in rehearsals right now for a touring musical, something I’ve wanted to do for a while, since college really, since there’s a certain amount of prestige to musicals that you just don’t really find with… Clifford the…
It’s not uncommon to hear about the cost of Hamilton tickets in the news these days. Leading up to Lin–Manuel Miranda’s last performance, tickets were showing up on StubHub for $20,000 a piece and the cheapest tickets available on that site was $1,350. Now that the original cast has departed, ticket prices should drop to…
So you think you might want to be a stage manager? Let me warn you now, almost everyone who works in the arts thinks they can be a stage manager and the vast majority can’t. Just because you are an organized human being doesn’t mean you have the skillset to be an excellent stage manager.…
One of the best ways to save money out on tour is to live on your per diem and the trick to that is keeping your necessary spending under that amount. The companies I’ve worked for have given me per diems in the $30-35 range, which seems to be pretty average for touring shows. Here’s…
Sometimes spending a little can make your life a lot easier. Apps are one of these instances. Like when I mentioned that a Macbook can be a frugal decision, sometimes a smartphone is too. Honestly, how did we get by before these things? A performer asks some crazy question about the origin of a word…
A few months ago I wrote a post about how to stock a stage management kit on a budget. One of those tips was to use freebie offers to stock your kit, but since then a few of you have reached out to find out more about exactly where and what you can find for…
So – I can’t exactly write a post on how to save on the best pair of black pants since this is a pretty endless debate in the theater world. Especially among the ladies of the theater world. See this extensive thread at the SMNetwork or this post at Headset Chatter. Personally, I’ve been on…
A few months ago I tossed out the idea “how much do stage managers make?” Because as one, I’m generally pretty curious. There’s a wide variety of pay scales among us (and the job itself varies widely), but I’ve always been a little puzzled about why we keep what we make such a secret. If…
Stage Managers are people with the answers to all the questions. How do we get that way? With a heck of a small army of tools and tricks. If you’ve already checked out how to stock your kit on a budget, here’s a list of several apps to beef up your smartphone for free* too.…
There are very few things I get really excited about, but good theater is one of them. Actually, it’s why I picked my entire career path. I was entranced by the magic of theater, the audience’s suspension of disbelief and the feeling that you can make anything happen onstage. I think a lot of people…
I think pretty much everyone who works in theater knows that stage managers could single handedly fund Staples. Turns out there’s actually a fantastic blog run by Rebecca called Stapler Confessions that focuses on personal finance AND getting the best deals at Staples. She is seriously into this store, and if there’s one person out there…
Every job has its tools and one of the biggest money suckers for a stage manager is their kit. What’s a stage manager kit? Well, it harkens back to the idea that a stage manager is the person who is “absolutely responsible for absolutely everything” for a production… which is an over or under simplification…
Check this out over at Vosa.com as part of the Make Money Monday (M$M) Series! I am not an artist. I had to take some art classes in college and barely scraped by with mercy B’s every time. I do, however, love Pinterest and I’m pretty tramadolhclnorx.com good at achieving success with some of the…
After all that jetsetting through my twenties, I recently transitioned to a pretty normal job. Now I work as a Production Manager for an Off-Broadway theater. It’s sort of a step away from Stage Management, but uses a lot of the same skills. If, for some crazy reason, this was a path you were thinking…