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Students and Novice Stage Managers / When to take the blame
« on: Feb 21, 2010, 07:51 pm »
The show is The Pirates of Penzance. We're surprisingly ahead of schedule in terms of the performers, but the tech is behind.
We have these two large bones that form a skull and crossbones shape during the overture, and them get placed on the downstage corners of the apron and live there for the rest of the show. As the carpenters have fallen a little behind, the brackets to prevent the bones from falling have not been built yet, and the bones just stand up by themselves.
Today we were finishing the Act I finale. Before calling the curtain standby, I asked my ASM who can see directly across the proscenium if the curtain would be clear of one of the bones, and whether it would be alright to close the curtain at the end of the act. She told me "yes", and I called the curtain close cue. Almost immediately, the bone fell and broke, narrowly missing a few actors.
The director was understandably angry. As I expected, that anger was mostly directed at me. I spoke to him afterward to tell him exactly what happened, but that didn't seem to make him any less angry with me. I understand that making sure that never happens, as well as ensuring the safety of the cast and crew, is my responsibility. However, in order for this mistake to have been made, the stage hands who placed the unit would have to have seriously missed their spike. The ASM also either lied to me directly or didn't know what I was talking about. Either way, simply saying "yes" was wrong
Although i told him I accept that the responsibility is ultimately mine, and told him it wouldn't happen again. Then I let him know about the other mistakes that contributed to this, and he still said it was up to me not to call that cue, and the blame was on me.
My question is, when should I have just accepted the blame, regardless of how much was actually my fault? There is a point when we should just say "ok, my bad, let's move on", and I know that's what the director expected, but that's not what I did, which only seemed to make matters worse. I'm also curious in general how often people just say "my bad" when it's actually not.
We have these two large bones that form a skull and crossbones shape during the overture, and them get placed on the downstage corners of the apron and live there for the rest of the show. As the carpenters have fallen a little behind, the brackets to prevent the bones from falling have not been built yet, and the bones just stand up by themselves.
Today we were finishing the Act I finale. Before calling the curtain standby, I asked my ASM who can see directly across the proscenium if the curtain would be clear of one of the bones, and whether it would be alright to close the curtain at the end of the act. She told me "yes", and I called the curtain close cue. Almost immediately, the bone fell and broke, narrowly missing a few actors.
The director was understandably angry. As I expected, that anger was mostly directed at me. I spoke to him afterward to tell him exactly what happened, but that didn't seem to make him any less angry with me. I understand that making sure that never happens, as well as ensuring the safety of the cast and crew, is my responsibility. However, in order for this mistake to have been made, the stage hands who placed the unit would have to have seriously missed their spike. The ASM also either lied to me directly or didn't know what I was talking about. Either way, simply saying "yes" was wrong
Although i told him I accept that the responsibility is ultimately mine, and told him it wouldn't happen again. Then I let him know about the other mistakes that contributed to this, and he still said it was up to me not to call that cue, and the blame was on me.
My question is, when should I have just accepted the blame, regardless of how much was actually my fault? There is a point when we should just say "ok, my bad, let's move on", and I know that's what the director expected, but that's not what I did, which only seemed to make matters worse. I'm also curious in general how often people just say "my bad" when it's actually not.