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Whenever You're Ready

Nora Polley on Life as a Stratford Festival Stage Manager

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Backstage with one of Canada’s greatest stage managers

Whenever You’re Ready is an intimate account of the career of Nora Polley, who — in her 52 years at the Stratford Festival — has learned from, worked with, and cared for some of the greatest directors, actors, stage managers, and productions in Canadian theatrical history. In so doing, Nora became one of the greatest stage managers this country has ever seen.

Here is an account of the Stratford Festival’s history like no other. From her childhood forays into a theater her father, Victor, worked tirelessly to help maintain, to her unexpected apprenticeship and the equally unexpected 40 years of stage management it ushered in, this is the Stratford Festival seen exclusively through Nora’s eyes. Here is an immersive account of a life spent in service of the theater, told from the ground floor: where actors struggle with lines and anxieties, where directors lose themselves in the work, where the next season is always uncertain, and where Nora — a stage manager, a custodian, a confidante, a pillar, a rock — finds her rhythm, her patience, her perseverance, her love, her consistency, and her invisibility. These are the qualities that make a stage manager great and, whenever you’re ready, this book will show you why.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 7, 2018
      Actor DeSouza-Coelho’s overlong debut, an as-told-by biography of veteran stage manager Nora Polley and her decades working at the Stratford Festival Theatre in Stratford, Ont., may hold some appeal to hardcore Canadian theater insiders, but even that could be a stretch. The chronological account of Polley’s working life, which DeSouza-Coelho tells using Polley’s first-person voice, reads like first drafts of tired, cynical diary entries. Characters are routinely introduced only by first names, and the lack of background information will confuse readers who weren’t in, for instance, a 1972 rehearsal or a 1988 performance. A conceit that divides whole chapters into split pages (one side play excerpts and the other Polley’s thoughts) is annoying, as is the insistence on inserting unexplained phrases such as “TIK! TIK!” While some of the biggest names in Canadian theater make appearances—Richard Monette, Martha Henry, William Hutt—they rarely come alive on the page as Polley says they did in her experiences with them. Ironically, the most involving sections tend to be the funerals of theatrical colleagues. This puzzling and disappointing biography doesn’t do its subject justice.

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  • OverDrive Read
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Languages

  • English

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