Sorry I never got back to posting this thread. We actually closed yesterday, every performance was sold out house. Apparently this is a first for the department!
The show went amazingly well, and I learned a lot more than I expected to on day one. But a lot of the suggestions you gave just didn't apply to our production. I really felt like this was run more like a musical than an opera.
There were 3 kinds of rehearsals - music, dialog (pronunciation/etc), and staging. I only had to attend staging rehearsals, and was really lost at what to do with all my free time!
I didn't have to cue entrances at all, and I don't understand how/why that would happen? That was never even an option brought up for this production. Can someone clue me in? I called from the FOH booth, and I had my trusted ASM backstage running shifts/etc. We also had the "recital hall stage manger" on com backstage. No one bothered to tell me he existed until he showed up first dress. Basically I used him as a go-between on com, because my ASM had so much running around to do.
The conductor and director are husband and wife. They were an amazing team and both helped me out every step of the way, especially with the music until I was comfortable with it. The director complemented my calling every night, exclaiming how difficult it is to call opera and how well I adapted. Honestly, it wasn't even the hardest show I've ever called. The only difficult part was following the dialog. Usually I memorize the dialog in my shows, but that wasn't happening with German, for obvious reasons. So any time I looked up from my book I'd get lost for a few seconds.
One night our supertitles went crazy and started fast forwarding through lines, thank you Powerpoint! The audience wasn't so keen on that...but we fixed it within a few lines.
One of the most useful things I did was highlighting character names in the score. It was easier to follow the music if I ever got lost, especially. As Papageno started singing, I could glance down at my book and see "Papageno" glowing back up at me in neon yellow. Problem solved.
Of course we had all sorts of interesting problems to deal with, as any show does, (i.e. no crew = chorus does shifts, horrendous cabling = we ran our own dmx, fog machine made SO MUCH NOISE so we switched to haze, etc etc...)
Oh, and the director never actually handed over the show to me, up until closing things were tweaked and changed slightly...ah university theatre!
Overall, it was a good experience.