Ex-Montrealer keeps Broadway shows on their rails

At 29, Amy Steinman has been stage managing Broadway shows for six years. HEATHER SOLOMON PHOTO

Amy Steinman is meticulous, calm, patient, and a quick thinker, all attributes needed by a stage manager responsible for the smooth running and maintenance of high-budget Broadway shows like Wicked that was her first gig in New York.  

Her current job is touring North America with the mega-hit musical Cinderella that she guided through 2-1/2 years of its run at the Broadway Theatre. 

The Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein II-Douglas Carter Beane creation works like a well-oiled machine thanks to the stage manager but she has had her share of handling its glitches, like the night the flight system failed and the Fairy Godmother was left hanging over the stage. 

“But the biggest mishap was when the power source to the computers that move the scenery died. We had to move things manually. It was great collaborative teamwork,” says Steinman.

At show time she can be found behind her desk in the wings with her open “bible”. That’s the stage manager’s book containing the master plan of actors’ and crew’s movements, the positions of set pieces and all the lighting and sound cues that she must communicate to the technicians verbally and via a colour-coded electronic button board that alerts them a cue is about to be called and the split-second in which to execute it. 

Over the run of the show, Steinman is responsible for preserving the blocking should an actor start straying from their original placements, for bringing incoming actors up to speed as she did for Fran Drescher who portrayed the wicked stepmother for five months, for reassigning lines and business when a performer falls ill, for safety and for coming up with ways and means to keep the director’s vision intact when circumstances intervene.

“It falls to us to keep a show as flawless as the first day. Stage managers make extraordinary artistic contributions but we’re not the ones onstage and we don’t get recognition for it. I can tell you it feels really good when your show wins that Tony,” says Steinman and she speaks from experience. 

Cinderella won the 2013 Tony for Best Revival of a Musical and, the year before, Death of a Salesman, which Steinman stage managed at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, won for Best Revival of a Play. It was directed by the late Mike Nichols and starred the late Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willy and (Spiderman) Andrew Garfield as Biff. 

Bring It On: the Musical followed as did Aladdin and now, Cinderella.

“The plans are to come to Toronto with Cinderella in December of this year into January. There are no plans as yet for Montreal, but it’s an open-ended tour so you never know,” says Steinman. 

The Montreal-born theatrician snaps up opportunities to return home to work in between her commitments in the Big Apple, staying and visiting with her parents in Town of Mount Royal. Most recently, she was called in by the Segal Centre for an intensive week to set the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre (DWYT) production of The Dybbuk on its feet before its June appearance in New York City’s Jewish performing arts Kulturfest, and August run in Montreal at the Segal Centre. 

Steinman is a DWYT veteran who stage-managed the company for almost a decade, and returned from New York for summers to stage-manage their tours to Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Florida and Toronto. 

She credits her Yiddish education at Jewish People’s and Peretz Schools for smoothing the way. Her experiences with the DWYT prompted her to take up theatre at Concordia University and follow it with a master’s degree in stage management at Columbia University, anchoring her in New York where she now lives. 

“I’m 29 but I’ve been doing this a long time,” says Steinman. “It’s my passion, what I want to do every day.”