Meticulous work behind the scenes sets the stage for Santa Fe Opera’s new season

“We focus all the lights in the roof every single day — it’s some 300 lights or something like that,” Dominguez-Schatz said. “And we get basically like an hour, two hours to do it.”

The Santa Fe Opera’s 2024 season opens Friday, with a new production of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata. Over the course of two months, the opera will stage five productions in repertoire — meaning the show changes from night to night.

For the opera’s backstage departments, staging the season’s performances is an exercise in precise organization.

Hundreds of lights must be manually adjusted; hundreds of costumes made, put on, taken off, laundered and pressed; and hundreds of props retrieved from the opera’s many-floored storage spaces and placed with precision prior to showtime. Each set piece must be maintained and repaired, and each character fitted with a wig and makeup. And all of the seats and music stands in the orchestra pit must be calibrated to a musician’s preferences.

In short, said electrics apprentice Julian Cordova, “It’s a whole, massive team effort every night.”

A few hours before Monday’s dress rehearsal for La Traviata, Liliana Cudly was making the bed — and she was making it poorly on purpose.

She placed some parts of the bed — a fitted sheet and a couple of pillows — in the traditional positions. But the top sheet and blanket were strewn open, untidy.

The bed — a consciously unmade deathbed — bookends the production, serving as a grim glimpse of the main character’s future, Cudly explained.

As a props run crew apprentice, it’s Cudly’s responsibility to ensure the show’s props are in the right place, at the right time.

That can be a complicated task. It might not look like it from the audience’s perspective, but the Santa Fe Opera has four stories of backstage space, several of which store everything from dozens of small stools to miscellaneous musical instruments to a plate of fake 1990s snack cakes (yes, that’s a real prop backstage at the opera).

Cudly is responsible for ensuring any necessary props are close at hand — or in hand — ahead of the performance.

“Part of the job that I do is to make sure that everything gets set before performances and make sure that everybody gets the props in their hands before they get onstage,” Cudly said.

As Cudly set up the prop bed, Liam Hurley’s team was slightly below the stage, installing a net between the edge of the stage and the top of the recessed orchestra pit to avoid accidental falls into the pit.

They watched the net rise — 75 inches, 80 inches, 85 inches — before reaching its final height of 92 inches from the pit floor.

The team is a different kind of pit crew, said Hurley, the co-supervisor for production music services: It prepares the space between the stage and the audience, where the orchestra performs.

Inside the pit, it’s Hurley’s job to ensure musicians have what they need.

“We attend to the orchestra members with preferences like the wind clips to hold their music down [and] their chairs,” Hurley said.

About 30 feet above the orchestra pit — and some 20 feet off the ground — Reid Stadelman swept the wall, clearing it of lint and debris as the time for Monday’s dress rehearsal approached.

That’s one part of the job for stage crew apprentices like Stadelman: Ensuring all of the stage’s surfaces are clean by showtime (and, if necessary, wearing clipped-in harnesses to avoid falling from high, stage-adjacent surfaces).

But the stage crew also is responsible for ensuring the show’s set pieces move smoothly — literally. For instance, Stadelman and fellow apprentice Matt Carroll are responsible for pivot walls — which can open and close like double doors — in the second show of the season, Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

“Really, our sole purpose is to be just like eyes and safety on the wall,” Stadelman said.

Stadelman and Carroll recently made a document — “The Matt and Reid Cheat Sheet,” Carroll called it — detailing all of their moves and cues during the show.

It’s three pages long, but the duo said it’ll help keep them in line come showtime.

By the start of Monday’s dress rehearsal, the electrics’ department’s plans were close to — but not yet — finalized, said Andrew Canaan, one of Santa Fe Opera’s lighting supervisors.

Nothing will be completely set in stone until the opening performance.

Lighting a production is very different from flipping a switch; the lights have to move with characters and change color. They’re controlled high above the stage, like 300 illuminated puppets, by a team of staff and apprentices.

Someone has to track every change in lighting and ensure it’s replicable for the next performance. That’s the lighting supervisors’ job, Canaan said.

“We maintain a database of every lighting fixture we have, every note that gets taken, blueprints where all the lights are, if we add things [or] take them away,” he said. “So I would say half of our job is to sit here at these computers and update our database.”

The lighting supervisors also provide what Dominguez-Schatz called “amazing paperwork” — a master plan that lays out each lighting technician’s responsibilities.

Dominguez-Schatz, who uses the pronoun they, said they remember it all through a combination of written and mental lists.

“The thing that helps me the most is literally just going through, writing down all the different things I need to do,” they said.

All that’s left, then, is to move down the list as the performance begins.

This story has been amended to reflect the following correction. A previous version of this story incorrectly reported the opera will stage four productions this summer. It will stage five.