Onstage > Students and Novice Stage Managers

Rehearsals: Giving line notes - a real novice question

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caroline.dargay:
A different question but still in the same vein, how do I decide what needs to be marked as a note and when? When I was ASMing my first college production a tip my SM gave me was to not bother with the smaller mistakes early in the rehearsal process and to note the more significant, plot-changing line issues first. I agree that this a good way of going about giving line notes at first so as to not bombard the actors at the start of their role in the show, but when should I start being more nit-picky? Is there a definite answer of  "by this week in the process you should start noting every change" or is it dependent on how you feel the cast is doing?

Maribeth:
It's a judgement call. Similar to what you describe, I like to start with the bigger notes first, then move on to more specific notes as the actors get more solid with the lines. This might mean that an actor who memorizes all of their lines by the 3rd day of rehearsal gets more "nit-picky" notes earlier, and if someone else is just getting off book by design run they are still getting more general notes by then.

One thing that can be really helpful is to make sure the actors are not learning lines incorrectly, which can be hard to fix later on. If there's an actor who's consistently giving an incorrect line, I will jump up (with script page in hand) and quietly give them the note verbally. This is especially useful if it's a line that affects another actor's next line.

emilymdykhouse:
In my theatre department, we use digital line notes. We create a different Google Doc for each member of the cast, adding a table where we type lines in one column and add specific notes in the other. This is also a useful system because we can indicate lines an actor messes up on multiple times (we make the text red) and we can indicate lines they've fixed (we add a strikethrough). Also, multiple ASMs can work on line notes at the same time!

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