Molly Goodwin compares her journey to the stage to any young woman interested in the arts. Growing up in Davenport, she danced as a young girl, played violin from age 4 through high school and performed in the marching band, the show choir and musicals.
"It was kind of in college that the switch flipped," she said, recalling a class at Luther College where her professor sat down with her and asked about her interests. When the phrase "stage management" was brought up, she was initially confused.
"I was like, 'what's stage managing?'" she said. She'd been pursuing a music major, and "had no reference point for the fact that stage managers existed, let alone that it was something that I could do."
But after her professor read off the laundry list of "very scary" things a stage manager is responsible for, Goodwin's interest was piqued. She wasn't afraid. In fact, she was excited.
"I changed my major," she said. "And the rest, they say, is history."
Today, Goodwin's resume is its own laundry list of exciting national and international Broadway tours she's stage managed, including productions of Pretty Woman, West Side Story and Legally Blonde. Now, she's on tour with the cast of Hadestown. The Tony award-winning, smash hit musical retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice will stop in Des Moines from April 11 - 13.
Stage managers coordinate all aspects of a theatrical production, from rehearsals to performances. As a production stage manager on a national tour, Goodwin travels with the cast, manages schedules, works with theaters and oversees each and every one of the technical cues within the show.
"The stage manager is kind of the hub," Goodwin said. "They talk to everybody, and they make sure that all the pieces are coming together. A PSM is responsible for — in a big umbrella picture way — the artistic maintenance of the show."
Working with a traveling production comes with its own challenges. While stage managers on Broadway arrive at the same workplace every day, Goodwin and the Hadestown tour cast are in a new city almost every week. Goodwin assesses each unique stage for adjustments that need to be made to the show.
"We've played venues where we're tighter, and so everything comes in on stage a little bit, and I've got to pull some of our blocking in so that we still see people on stage and they're not buried behind either a proscenium or a sound tower," she said. "Stationary people who are running stationery shows come in, and they are literally doing the same show every night. We are coming in, and sometimes we're doing very different shows just based on the physical space that we have put the show into."
Any prop, set movement, sound or lighting change has to be called by the stage manager, who sits backstage with a headset and a giant book of cues.
Goodwin knows off the top of her head that she calls 463 light cues in the show, many of which are sequenced with the show's 40 songs. She says having a music background helps her with her process.
"There are sections I conduct along with, there are sections that I will, like, bounce around with to keep myself in tempo. There are some things that I'll dance with — either for myself or to have a little moment with the cast on stage," she said.
With so many tours under her belt, Goodwin hesitates to name a favorite, but for her, Hadestown stands apart in a special way.
"Hadestown definitely lives in a favorite world for me. The aspect of it being a 'sung-through' really kind of lights up my connection to music, and it makes it fun for me to call," she said.
Even from backstage, she feels deeply connected to the show she's responsible for running from beginning to end, night after night.
"I'm obviously not on stage when [the actors] get to step out and start that storytelling again, but I think there's this grounding and anchoring that happens, and it's really beautiful to watch all of us just settle into it and live in that world for that two-and-a-half hours and share that world with the humans that have come to see us that evening," she said. "It's an incredible world, and I hope that everybody who comes to see us leaves feeling that way."
