Rodrigo Esquivel Herrera, a senior in Theatre and Dance, worked as a stage management production assistant in Beetlejuice The Musical’s first national tour in New York City last fall. Sydney Pattillo from the Department of Theatre and Dance spoke with him about his preparation and experience working on a Broadway production.
How did you hear about this opportunity?
I knew that I wanted to do musical theater, so I started looking for opportunities outside of Texas. I worked at the Muny in St. Louis [St. Louis Municipal Opera Theatre] last summer, so I met one of the stage managers there. She’s friends with the production stage manager for Beetlejuice, and when the production stage manager was looking for people, he reached out to my friend, and then she passed along my résumé. I did an interview, and I talked to people. You need to know someone, or someone needs to know you, because they’re not posted anywhere.
Describe a typical day working on Beetlejuice The Musical. What sort of tasks did you complete?
It changes a lot every day. Basic tasks are updating the paperwork and just running the deck and the rehearsal room. So, whatever the numbers and scenes that they’re working on, we need to make sure that the production, the cast and the directing team have whatever they need — like all the necessary things to run a specific number. At the end of the day, I did a lot of putting things back together, a little bit of cleaning and making sure that everything we have is ready for the next day or for whenever it’s needed again.
How do you feel your time and experience at UT helped prepare you for this role?
There are a lot of differences between collegiate theater and professional theater. But we basically get a really strong foundation of what a stage manager does. Something that I realized recently is that we have a big opportunity at UT as stage managers to really stage manage shows because there is no master’s program for stage management. So, as undergraduates, we are in charge and working with graduate students. They have this level and experience that makes stage managers do their work better and in a more professional and efficient way. We’re closer to that professional experience, dealing with all the paperwork and all the meetings and running the room in general.