Backstage at SF Opera: From the Makeup Table to the Prompter’s Box

“This is the blood table,” said Matthew Shilvock, general director of San Francisco Opera. “I thought about putting a photo on social media but immediately realized that this would not be appropriate.”

We were backstage at the War Memorial Opera House during a performance of Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence, an SF Opera co-commission that the company staged in June 2024. Innocence is about the aftermath of a school shooting, and the blood table was where the makeup crew applied stage blood to the performers.

On the table were squirt and nozzle bottles, as well as baskets with blood packs, which would later burst onstage, each basket labeled with the name of a performer.

There are many types of stage blood, but every opera house that has presented Innocence has used the same brand, from the French company Maqpro, even though it’s difficult to source in the United States. Jeanna Parham, head of wig, hair, and makeup at SF Opera, explained that director Simon Stone had a desire for consistency in color between productions and alternative brands just didn’t work for him.

Also backstage, there was a cleanup table with supplies for removing blood — and wedding cake — from the performers. One night, the cake that mezzo-soprano Ruxandra Donose (as the Waitress) threw at soprano Claire de Sévigné (the Mother-in-Law) wound up on Sévigné’s face instead of her dress. You can see stage blood on Vilma Jää’s character Markéta and a snippet of the cake-throwing scene in the video trailer for Innocence.

Before SF Opera stages a production, Parham works with the costumer, if that designer comes with the show, to make sure that the hair and makeup fit the overall aesthetic. Among recent productions, the makeup for Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten was designed to match David Hockney’s boldly colorful sets. For director Barrie Kosky’s The Magic Flute, the makeup had to convey the sepia tones of silent film.

During performances — especially of a fast-moving opera like Poul Ruders’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which concludes its run at SF Opera on Oct. 1 — the hair, wig, and makeup department coordinates closely with the costume department to ensure that the performers look the way they’re supposed to onstage. The backstage area might include quick-change rooms where dressers can help performers out of one costume and into another and also a table for wig changes.

Behind the Scenes

SF Opera’s recent productions of Innocence and The Handmaid’s Tale have driven home the extent to which performers and performances depend on a multitude of invisible professionals. Take the stagehands. In most operatic repertory, a scene would unfold over a comparatively long period of time on a single set. The second act of Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, which opened SF Opera’s 2024–2025 season, is typical. It’s about a half-hour long and, in the company’s production, took place on a set that was put onstage during the first intermission and then removed during the second.

Innocence had a huge freestanding two-level set designed by Chloe Lamford that simultaneously represented the site of a wedding celebration and the international school where the shooting took place a decade earlier. The set rotated throughout the performance, presenting different rooms at the school and the wedding venue, meaning more or less continuous scene changes. Deploying such a set is a special challenge at the War Memorial, which is more than 90 years old and does not have a stage turntable. Special equipment had to be installed, and that’s the case any time you see a rotating set at SF Opera.

As anyone who saw Innocence knows, the black-clad stage crew got the first bow at the end of each performance — before the singers, actors, revival director, and conductor. That’s because the crew gave a virtuoso performance of its own, converting different rooms from the wedding venue to the school and back again, all within strict time limits. Blood appeared on at least one wall during the shooting, and the table for the feast changed as the wedding celebration progressed. Here’s a one-minute backstage video taken by Shilvock, showing some of what the rapid changes required. Now imagine this for the entire 105-minute duration of the opera.

The crew had one trick up its collective sleeve, which wasn’t at all obvious from the audience. Lamford’s set included a concealed room where scenic elements such as tables, chairs, and other props could be stored. Two members of the properties department stayed in the room throughout each performance. You can see its location in the photo above, on the second story to the right of the balcony.

Staging The Handmaid’s Tale has presented its own array of challenges. The production’s unit set was also designed by Lamford, and it has to enable extremely fast changes between the opera’s more than 30 scenes.

The staging accomplishes this through austerity. Lamford’s set is wide open, without dividers or obstructions, and each scene is stripped to its essentials, using only a small number of props that can be rolled in from the wings by chorus members, supernumeraries, or the stage crew. The Commander’s house is represented by separate regions onstage: the living room (to the left in the above photo), his study (center), and the leading character Offred’s room (right). Just a few props suffice to define the areas: a couch, a desk, and a bed, plus a few lamps.

The stage can also be divided into two regions, front and back, by lowering a glass wall from the fly space above, sometimes signaling the split between scenes in different timelines and sometimes allowing for the action in front to be mirrored behind.

Keeping It All Together

All of the on- and offstage activity in an opera needs to be coordinated. In The Handmaid’s Tale, there’s an extremely small margin for error because the stage action tracks so closely and specifically to the score. The same was true of Innocence.

At the center of all the activity is the stage manager, who has the overall responsibility for coordinating everything. Darin Burnett, the most senior stage manager at SF Opera, served in the role for both Innocence and now The Handmaid’s Tale. During a performance, he’s stationed at stage right, standing at a console that includes monitors and space for his own heavily annotated copy of the score. He calls the lighting, sound, prop, and personnel cues.

Whoever is stage managing checks in with the conductor before each performance, though the two don’t communicate during the opera. For The Handmaid’s Tale, Burnett has made sure that Karen Kamensek’s earpiece is in place because there’s a scene with prerecorded audio requiring a click track.

During Innocence, an offstage chorus had to be folded into the mix. The chorus was backstage, with microphones on each singer’s stand and Chorus Director John Keene conducting. Keene also wore an earpiece so that he could hear the orchestra and the onstage performers clearly, and he additionally relied on a video monitor showing conductor Clément Mao-Takacs in the pit.

Burnett has been involved in theater since his high school days, and he started his career in opera as an apprentice with Santa Fe Opera. The technical skills required for stage management, he said, include an understanding of how theater works, how to organize people, how to read music, and even how to prepare the right paperwork. A stage manager also needs to be caring, attentive, observant, and tactful because of the human side of working with performers and creative types. There’s only a limited amount of time to get an opera onstage and many issues to resolve diplomatically along the way.

Providing Emotional and Physical Safety

The Handmaid’s Tale includes wrenching scenes of sexual violence, such as the Commander’s attempts, with his wife a passive participant, to impregnate Offred, as well as moments of sexual intimacy, such as a tryst between Offred and the chauffeur Nick. Such scenes can be difficult to watch and difficult for the performers, who must live through them many times in rehearsal and onstage. In the past few years, theater and opera companies have increasingly brought in intimacy coordinators to help support performers in these sensitive scenes.

Maya Herbsman, the intimacy coordinator for The Handmaid’s Tale, described her role in a 2019 interview with J. The Jewish News of Northern California:

“It’s about creating safe and consensual choreography for actors working on intimate scenes, whether they are sexual, romantic, or familial. We talk about what the character would do, and that takes the emotional charge, the personal intensity, out of it. That helps actors feel safe and be comfortable setting their limits. It’s like fight choreography — it wouldn’t be reasonable not to break down fight scenes into specific, repeatable steps.”

The Handmaid’s Tale also has scenes of outright physical violence. Two female characters, played by dancers, are hanged for their crimes. There’s gunfire, and there’s a scene where Offred’s small daughter is kidnapped. There’s no physical risk to the performers because the assault weapons you see onstage are fakes that can’t be fired. Nonetheless, all stage weaponry is treated as though it’s real. The rifles are locked up in a rack, and only designated members of the props team can unlock and distribute them, working with wardrobe to strap the guns to the performers’ costumes during quick changes. Weapons in all productions are locked in the prop room or SF Opera’s armory when they’re not in use.

As for the hangings: The dancers are fitted with special vests under their costumes, and with nooses around their necks, they’re suspended in the air from wires that are hooked to those vests.

Under the Stage

The prompter is another role that’s all about helping the performers. Audience members can’t see this individual during a performance, but they can see where he or she is stationed, under a rectangular black box protruding from the stage.

Andrew King, the prompter for The Handmaid’s Tale, explained that the box isn’t completely solid. The back is made up of fabric so that the prompter can hear the orchestra — well, more like the instruments closest to the back of the pit, where the woodwinds are typically located.

The prompter is in a small, cramped space that has just enough room for the necessary equipment. King said that this includes a chair, a music stand for the score, two lights (one on the score and one on the prompter’s face so that it’s visible to the singers), two monitors showing the conductor, and a child’s keyboard that acts as a pitch pipe. There’s also a fan — it can get hot in there.

Prompters are members of the company’s music staff, and their responsibilities include serving as rehearsal pianists and coaching individual singers. During a performance, they’re an extension of the conductor, helping singers enter at the right times, on the right pitches, and with the right words. Prompters cue entrances with the same physical gestures as the conductor and often count down beforehand. If they see singers about to enter too early, they signal to stop; King said that a raised hand is his most common gesture when prompting.

Giving pitches is another important prompter function, particularly in dissonant operas like The Handmaid’s Tale and Innocence. King said that prompting pitches for mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts, who’s currently singing Offred, is different from prompting most singers. Roberts has perfect pitch, so if he just mouths the name of the note, she can find it on her own. More often, the prompter will sing the pitch.

Prompters also mouth the words of each entrance to help the singers. The job requires proficiency in a variety of languages, and prompters who come to SF Opera from the Adler Fellowship program have received language training there. Some members of the music staff already know certain languages; for example, Kseniia Polstiankina Barrad is a native speaker of Russian and Ukrainian. In a multilingual feat during Innocence, Matthew Piatt prompted lines in English, Finnish, Czech, French, Romanian, Swedish, German, Spanish, and Greek.

It’s All About Support

What comes through most strongly when you talk with anyone at SF Opera is a dedication to helping singers give the best performances they can. The words “support” and “care” come up constantly when discussing how best to communicate. At many performances, Shilvock stops by the dressing rooms to see how the performers are doing. The prompters ask where a cue or other help might be needed. The costume and makeup staff check in to make sure everyone is physically comfortable. It takes a whole company and a range of skilled professionals —onstage, in the pit, backstage — to put on a successful performance.