I have loved theatre since I was a kid, I thought it was amazing how one could express themselves in front of an audience while portraying a fictional/non-fictional character. Our school has done many plays and musicals such as Blood Brothers, Antigone Now! and so much more. This year’s play was “The Little Shop Of Horrors, ” which was truly an exciting watch.

Although I wasn’t acting in the play I did help backstage by managing all the different props and helping Pep assign roles to our different backstage crew members. I had done backstage quite a few times in the past although this play was by far the most I had to do as a backstage crew member as we had to keep track of many different props which were fragile and important to the play.

The first thing we did to make things easier for Pep and me, was we made a Google doc with the layout of the auditorium to remember where all props should be placed and on which side of the stage the props should be placed as it would make things easier for the rest of the crew members as well.

After doing so we started arranging all the props in their designated places and wrote down the different queues on the script to make it easier for us to keep up. We also annotated the script with the different props belonging to the characters.

During the dress rehearsal, we made a few minor mistakes, such as missing our cues to bring in the props (totally not me), and sometimes taking out some of the props, although I think that we did a good job overall with no major mistakes. We faced some challenges, but the show was very successful on all 3 nights. On show day, there were small challenges we had to overcome such as some people’s mics not working on stage or certain people muting their mics, but we managed to solve them after lots of running up and down the auditorium.

Doing backstage in this particular production was a completely new and different experience for me. However, I had a great time doing it and I would highly recommend others to try it as well.