BEHIND THE SCENES AT OLD GLOBE

While a visitor marveled at the picturesque colonial California set designed for Shakespeare’s “A Comedy of Errors,” Old Globe Theatre production stage manager Douglas Pagliotti turned his attention to getting the night’s dress rehearsal under way.

Pagliotti, sitting at a makeshift table set up over the tops of seats in the theater, spoke into a headset microphone: “House to half. Sound cue 1, and the bell: Go. Sound cue 2: Go. House out and light cue 1: Go.” Somewhere amid the rapid-fire stream of stage manager argot, a bell began to chime, Spanish music wafted over the outdoor theater, and the costumed cast members surged onto the stage.

As actor Mitch Edmonds, dressed as an 18th- or 19th-Century Alta California businessman, delivered the crucial lines that set up the action of the play, Pagliotti continued to rattle off instructions to assistants backstage and in the control booth at the rear of the theater.

Five minutes into the show, Pagliotti leaned over and whispered his brief criticism. “The opening was not at all right,” he said. “The sun effect didn’t work and the sound was way off. You couldn’t hear part of the speech.” That was news to the visitor, who thought the opening was smooth and humorous. But Pagliotti, who is in his seventh year as the Old Globe’s production stage manager, has a keen eye for technical glitches.

Besides managing productions himself, Pagliotti is responsible for instructing guest stage managers in the Globe’s method of producing plays and for training stage manager interns.

As theater becomes increasingly technical, stage managers are increasingly crucial to the success of productions, serving as the critical bridge between the technical and the creative elements of a performance.

Old Globe Managing Director Thomas Hall, formerly a stage manager, related an incident that captures the skills required of a good stage manager.

In 1978, Hall was stage managing Shakespeare’s fairy tale, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

It was opening night. The scenery and elaborate costumes were ready. The actors had been drilled to perfection. The Globe’s first computerized lighting console had been preset with 240 lighting cues, each of which changed the look, ideally to convey the mood shifts, of the play.

Then disaster. An hour before curtain time, the new computerized lighting console “crashed.”

Acting quickly, Hall shifted from state-of-the-art to seat-of-the-pants theater.

He informed director Jack O’Brien what had happened, then huddled with his master electrician. They patched all the lights into the Globe’s manual lighting console and hurriedly developed a plan that reduced the 240 cues to 12, the limit of that console.

“Using the 12 cues, basically I made up the show as I went along,” Hall said last week. “We were just praying we could get through the evening.”

After the performance, Hall and his crew were drenched in sweat and emotionally drained when O’Brien came up to congratulate them. The lighting looked better than it had ever been in rehearsals, O’Brien told them. He was so happy, he wanted it done that way every night.

“Although he meant it as a compliment, I could have killed him,” Hall said. “He had no clue what we had been through.”

Indeed, few people outside the theater understand what stage managers do. The stage manager runs every performance. Before each night’s opening curtain, the stage manager traditionally gives a 30-minute notice to the cast and company, then a five-minute notice, then calls “places.”

Using a prompt book, the stage manager calls each lighting and sound cue and scenery change to technicians through an in-house communication system.

Long after the director, composer and designers have moved on to other projects, the stage manager presides nightly to ensure that every performance remains faithful to the original artistic vision.

A stage manager must be prepared to handle anything from a touchy, high-strung actor to the unexpected crisis. Should anything go wrong, everyone turns to him or her.

“You have to be the one stable person at the center where everything else may be whirling around like a hurricane,” said Diane F. DeVita, stage manager for “The Night of the Iguana,” now playing on the Festival Stage, and “Benefactors,” which opens Friday at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage.

An actor once died minutes before a performance DeVita was involved in. That time DeVita installed an understudy, and the show went on.

Stage managers must be highly organized and skilled communicators, said DeVita and Maria Carrera, who is stage managing “Marry Me a Little” and “There’s One in Every Marriage,” which opens July 24 at the Old Globe.

“You’ve got to anticipate anything,” DeVita said. “You’ve got to have backup buzzers and bells for when the bells and buzzers fail.”

As for organization, Globe production stage manager Douglas Pagliotti has to keep track of 30 actors for “Antony and Cleopatra,” ensuring that all are present and accounted for before each rehearsal and performance.

Pagliotti, who is dividing his time as stage manager between “Antony and Cleopatra” and “The Comedy of Errors,” which opens Sunday, switched to stage managing in college.

“I realized I wasn’t going to be good enough as an actor,” he said. “Stage managing was the next closest thing to being a part of the creative process.”

Pagliotti is in his seventh year as the Old Globe’s production stage manager. He has worked on 70 productions at the Globe.

“The part I like is watching (a production) come together,” Pagliotti said. “You work the longest hours in the business. I tell all our stage managers that you’re the first one at a rehearsal or performance and the last one to leave.”

“It’s not like working at IBM,” DeVita said of stage managing. “There’s a high emotional level of the actors who are really putting themselves out there. It’s easy to feed into the emotion,” but stage managers have to avoid losing their perspective, she said. When there are differences of opinion “you try to turn that negative energy around into a solution.”