Wizards of awe Three steps ahead, averting errors and drifting curtains, stage manager Candace Jacobson works backstage magic for RWB’s Nutcracker By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 4:34 PM CST Monday, Dec. 25, 2023 Last Modified: 12:15 PM CST Monday, Feb. 12, 2024 Updates

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It’s easy for an audience to get lost in the magic of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Nutcracker. The arresting pas de deux between Clara and the Nutcracker Prince. The epic food-fight battle between mice and men. The sweet Sugar Plum Fairy and an adorable coterie of rosy-cheeked angels.

But there’s a ballet happening backstage, too.

No one will ever see the meticulous choreography it takes to bring such magic to the stage, and ideally, no one notices it either. And Candace Jacobson is the person who helps make things seamless.

Jacobson, 39, is a longtime stage manager with the RWB. She is the liaison among the production department, the artistic department and the company dancers to get everything ready for a show.

“I kind of feel like an air traffic controller some days,” she says with a laugh.

Tonight is opening night at the Centennial Concert Hall and, normally, Jacobson would also be calling the cues for the show. But she’s going on maternity leave in less than a month and has handed those duties to fellow stage manager Mike Duggan. He’ll be the man responsible for making sure that the lights change when they’re supposed to and the scenery pieces move when they’re supposed to, whether that’s at stage level, or up in the air moving in and out, or side to side.

Duggan, 36, is a longtime freelance stage manager who came up with Jacobson, but he had never stage-managed for ballet before joining the RWB for this year’s production of Nutcracker, which has been touring across the country over the past month.

“It’s a deliberate challenge,” he says of calling ballet. “Obviously, there’s no dialogue to cue from. They all know the show inside and out, so I have to catch up a little.”

Indeed, it’s detail-oriented work, but if he’s playing catchup tonight, it’s not obvious. Duggan’s cuing is calm and clear. He’s speaking over a headset and referring to three monitors, two fixed on the stage and one in the orchestra pit-trained on maestro Julian Pellicano. He’s positioned downstage right, so he needs to be able to see what’s going on.

In front of him is a thick binder of cue sheets, flagged with Post-it notes. Duggan follows along with a copy of his own sheet music, bobbing his head and tapping along with Tchaikovsky as performed by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. On the tiny screen to his left is Pellicano, who is as fun to watch as the dancers on stage.

“I love watching Julian,” Jacobson says.

She loves all of it, actually.

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When we meet at the RWB’s Graham Avenue studios a couple days before opening night, Jacobson is dressed in a thematically appropriate sweatshirt. “I’m in my Nutcracker era” is emblazoned on the back.

Jacobson’s been in her Nutcracker era for nearly a decade. She joined the RWB in 2013, first as an assistant stage manager, then stage manager. (She’s never actually seen this version of Nutcracker from the audience and it premièred in 1999.)

The stage-management bug was planted back when she was a student at St. Mary’s Academy. She studied at the University of Winnipeg and did two summers at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity before going on to stage-manage for nearly every arts organization in the city before arriving at RWB.

In addition to her many duties during a performance, Jacobson helps build the schedule with artistic and production, and is the keeper of the time. She points out that dancers with Canadian Actors Equity and the stage crew with the IATSE union have different rules with respect to breaks and span of time, so she has to make sure those schedules align as much as possible — in addition to running a rehearsal and making sure all the production elements are working and the dancers know what’s coming.

But Jacobson thrives on this kind of logistical work. “I love puzzles. Like, as a kid, I used to do logic puzzles all the time; I loved them.

“I think that’s what translates as well, when I’m trying to get a children’s chorus of singers to the pit and polar bears getting ready in polar bear costumes and snowflakes dancing their hearts out on stage while all this other stuff is going around backstage, calling cues and watching the snow fall from the sky, to make sure it’s not falling too heavy that day or too light that day or if it’s blowing more because we sold well that day, so the air current coming from the theatre is different.”

She laughs.

“It’s a whole thing. It’s a whole thing backstage.”

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It’s 5:32 p.m., 58 minutes before curtain, and Jacobson is in the green room, putting on mascara. She’s wearing a black RWB Nutcracker tour shirt and snowflake earrings. She has a different Christmas-themed shirt for every night of the run. “I love Christmas,” she says. “No one was surprised when I started doing Nutcracker.”

She grabs a stack of passes for the Winnipeg Boys Choir who will be joining the WSO tonight and heads out into the hallway to greet them at the backstage doors.

It’s busy, with company dancers and students alike in various stages of costume making their way to the wings. So far, nothing has gone off the rails — just some small snags.

Nutcracker features a large cast of kids and the thing about kids is they get sick. They are down one party kid tonight and Jacobson spots a tiny girl with a big cough. “It’s too late to do anything about it now, but maybe send a note to Mom and Dad,” Jacobson says surreptitiously to a fellow staff member. “And see if she can wear a mask when she’s not performing. I don’t want to lose a whole cast of whoevers.”

Premier Wab Kinew and his wife, Lisa Monkman, are two of the walk-on guests tonight for the Christmas Party scene — along with Mayor Scott Gillingham and his wife, Marla Gillingham, and John Lu from TSN — and they are running late. Costuming for men in walk-on roles is easy; they just wear the suit they came in. The women, however, need time to get into costume and, if needed, wigs, as the ballet is set in 1913.

Jacobson, however, is unflappable. “She might not be wigged, but hopefully they can get her into a costume.” (They do indeed; everyone’s onstage and in period-best right when they’re supposed to be.)

At 6:19 p.m., the disembodied voice of Duggan makes a call for the dancers to sign in. “Whoa, Mike, that’s really late,” Jacobson says good-naturedly. “Usually, we do that call half an hour before curtain.” She’ll just add that to the show notes for the debrief they do after every performance.

Soon, it’s time for a very important ritual: the pre-show pee. It’s five minutes to curtain.

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Occasionally, the stage manager will be tasked with other duties — such as quarterbacking onstage marriage proposals.

Jacobson has handled two Nutcracker proposals, including last December, when former RWB principal dancer Yue Shi popped the question to fellow former RWB principal dancer Chenxin Liu during the final bows.

Jacobson had to make sure every department was in on it, except for Liu. “We had to make sure Chenxin was Clara that night and not, like, Grandma or something,” she says. “And that Yue wasn’t also in Act II so he could be in his nice suit and get the flowers.”

They pulled it off.

“The second I had to call the lights up, because I knew it was coming, I started crying,” Jacobson says. “I was just calling lighting cues all the way through crying. It was really sweet.”

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Backstage, Jacobson immediately spots a problem.

“Oh, that air current is killer,” she says, eyeing a filmy white curtain known as the white swag slowly but problematically billowing in toward centre stage. “What’s it stuck on?”

An air current from the room has pushed the swag up, delaying a scene change. Air currents don’t just affect the snow, evidently.

“A door could be open, the audience could be more or less full, a vent could be open,” Jacobson says. “We work with it on the fly. And tomorrow it might be different.”

Occasionally, much bigger things go wrong. “I’ve had to stop the show and bring in the curtain three times now, I think, since being with the ballet,” Jacobson says.

A slippery floor would be a showstopper for obvious safety reasons. When the RWB is performing with the WSO, there is a mechanism in place for the stage manager to communicate with the pit.

“I have a light that I can flick — it’s a little red light — to get maestro’s attention,” Jacobson says. “And then he has an old-school phone receiver downstairs that patches into our same headset so he can hear. So if a scene change is taking longer, and he’s expecting the curtain to come up and it doesn’t, he can pick it up and listen and hear something’s going on backstage so he won’t start the orchestra.”

Safety is also an important element of her job, which is why Jacobson doesn’t work alone.

“My assistant stage manager Paige (Lewis) takes care of a lot of the on-the-deck running people because I can’t see everything,” Jacobson says. “She gives me or Mike clears for safety purposes, making sure I can call that next scenery piece and nobody’s standing underneath it right. Or, you know, the bedroom furniture is gone so I can start that next scene change for everybody on headset, because also the people in the fly rail, who are manually pulling the ropes, can’t always see that the bed has cleared and they don’t want to squish a person or a thing.”

And when things go absolutely right, it’s incredibly satisfying.

“This next cue is my favourite because when it’s done perfectly, it’s extremely beautiful,” Jacobson says backstage.

Onstage, Clara (principal dancer Elizabeth Lamont) is about to be transported to an ethereal winter wonderland with her Nutcracker Prince (soloist Michel Lavoie). On Duggan’s cue, everything from the living room set leaves the stage in unison to reveal an enchanted winter forest. Snow begins to fall, setting the stage for the Act I closer, Waltz of the Snowflakes.

Duggan has done it perfectly.

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Stage managers are always thinking three moves ahead. She spots an oversized carrot for the battle scene snagging on a cord and wordlessly fixes it. Anticipate, anticipate, anticipate.

Past performances are also good teachers. Jacobson always tells the dancers performing as reindeer to keep facing forward when they are travelling in pairs, because if they look to the side, they’ll end up locking antlers with their friend.

Stage managers notice things that most people wouldn’t notice, but that’s the point.

“It makes us bad audience members,” Jacobson admits with a laugh.

“I try to turn it off,” Duggan says.

The second act is a little less busy, so Jacobson and Duggan are able to watch a bit more of the performances onstage, including those by guest artists the Asham Stompers and Rusalka. Everyone backstage is silent for Clara and the Prince’s grand pas de deux.

“Everyone watches this one,” Jacobson says.

But then it’s time to focus again. The show’s finale has nine quick-fire cues back to back, as we move out of the Sugar Plum Fairy’s kingdom and back into Clara’s reality — first her bedroom, then outside. That billowing swag tries to assert itself again but the rest goes off without a hitch.

The dancers take their bows. Duggan playfully shouts at the dancers to keep it going.

The curtain comes down. There’s just one last cue.

“House lights, go.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com