BWW Blog: Christopher Panella - Advice to Actors: Take a Break from the Stage and Work Behind It

Performers love the stage. Actors love every single second they get onstage, every moment under the spotlight. It's the best feeling in the world for us. But the worst thing to be in this highly competitive theatre world is specialized in only one aspect of theatre. For instance, only being trained in one style of dance isn't going to help you out in the long run when you audition for a dance company. The same is for performers. Stop performing. Quit thinking that it's okay to only be an actor, a singer, a dancer. Learn every aspect of theatre, every talent you can. This may seem annoying, but as an artist, it will help you in the long run to be knowledgeable about as much as you can.

As an actor, I crave the stage. Until my sophomore year of high school, I was strictly a performer. Yet, I got the most amazing opportunity to grow as a theatre kid in the spring, when Ft. Lauderdale High School hosted and crewed my old middle school, Beachside Montessori Village, and their drama club's production of Mary Poppins. I had been in Beauty and the Beast JR. at Beachside when the drama club began performing our musicals at Ft. Lauderdale High, their drama club crewing our shows. The only members of their club that were allowed to crew were the actors. This rule was still in place my freshman year, when Beachside brought The Music Man and FLHS Drama's actors crewed the show. It was, first and foremost, a learning experience. I adapted to the backstage environment, the thinking-on-your-feet mentality needed to survive and run the production as smoothly as possible. My sophomore year, as previously mentioned, involved Beachside bringing Mary Poppins to Ft. Lauderdale in the spring. It was their first two-act production, and I got the opportunity to stage manage the production. At first, I felt confident and prepared that my organization skills and work ethic would lead the production to success, especially since the actors that had volunteered to crew from our drama club were all prepared and excited to work. As the tech week of the show went on, I finally understood the hell that is tech week fully. I got little sleep, I ran around stage and backstage more than Usain Bolt (obviously a hyperbole, Usain runs far more than I do), and found myself crying for no reason (this may sound dramatic, but it's no joke). The pure stress of getting the sets on stage for each scene in a matter of less than ten seconds, triple-checking that everyone knew their job, communicating constantly with the director and the tech booth and the backstage crew and the parents all made me feel more stretched and worn than an elastic band.

Now, I understand that this sounds absolutely terrible and most actors reading this are probably never going to take my advice to work backstage. But hear me out. It was so worth it. Truly and honestly, it was one of the best experiences of my high school theatre career. I grew to understand the constant hardships crew face, something I had imagined but never materialized and fully understood. As actors, we think we work so hard for our performances. Imagine the work we put in for roles, auditions, dances, memorization, characterization, times ten. That's the work that crew puts in on a daily basis for our ideas of a show to become a reality. We owe crew everything. Working backstage has been the most rewarding opportunity; I've grown to understand that this career is difficult for everyone involved, and that we should all be kinder to each other. In a production, every person should appreciate one another, from crew to performers to tech to costume to the directors themselves. Performers, never feel like you are the one doing all the work. Without crew, you wouldn't even be a performer.

Performing is hard. But backstage is much harder. My best advice to every performer is to work backstage at least once in your career. Just to feel the stress of crew. It will make you a better performer, as you'll understand the stage and the way productions and shows work more, but you'll also appreciate crew more. After a production, the cast usually refers to themselves as a "second family." Once you work backstage, cast and crew will become a family. And not a second family, a first family of people who appreciate every effort put into making a production happen.

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