I'm at home and have time to go further into detail on why everyone should buy "
Cue Tips" by Elizabeth Ward.
It's written for high school theater students but is a great resource for others trying to make their theater group more professional, and I'll even use it when training new college students to be a SM. It is broken down into 3 sections:
Section 1) The personality traits of a good
stage manager
Section 2) 50 pages on the production process: pre-production, building an SM kit, audition forms, schedules, rehearsals, warm
ups, taking
blocking, Warm
ups, Production meetings, tech and dress rehearsals, great performance night check lists, calling cues,
strike,
etc...
Section 3) 40 pages of resources. Forms, examples of work, glossary, even some quizzes.
It's great and it's cheap! Anyone who trains new people to
stage manage needs it.
The other text from this summer's class was "
Stage Management" by Lawrence Stern and Alice R. O'Grady. It's a stuffy professional take on
stage management. It's also $80 for the
current 9th edition! I would recommend picking up a used copy of an older edition (
7th edition used $4). It's VERY formal, and very good, but I occasionally found my self shaking my head and wondering what planet the authors are from. I've worked with a lot of SM's and I'm yet to find one who is as insane with detail like the authors of this
book. Nothing in this
book is a bad idea, but there are things in there that no normal
stage manager has enough time in their life to obsess over.