Hi everyone! I'm a college senior stage manager, and have been stage managing in the theater department for a couple years as well as working at the local 2000 seat road house as the in-house ASM, so I'm not new to stage managing. Next week though, I'm starting work on my first opera, for the music department. I was just asked to do this yesterday (the professional SM they hired backed out), but it happened to work for my schedule so I've accepted. I read music well, so that's not a concern. My worries are concerning how late in the process I'm starting- I don't even get a score till monday, and I'm pretty sure that's the start of tech, that night, when I start. I know that at some point very soon I'll need to time out 30-sec intervals in my script so I can page actors to the stage. Should I worry about paging them until dress though? I don't know when I'm going to have time to time it out while I'm working out cues and such. Any thoughts on whether getting hold of a recording and timing it out to that would be helpful? I guess I'm just trying to get into the process as smoothly as possible without looking incompetant since I don't really have the opportunity to do any prep work at all. What do you think would be a good step-by-step approach for me to get started with until I actually know what is going on? Sorry this sounds so rambly, I'm just frustrated with the director who doesn't really seem to notice that it might help me to have an idea of the schedule, etc before I show up. Thanks for listening/helping! -Meg