Let’s be honest about tech week for a second.
It’s loud. It’s long. Someone will cry (possibly you). A lighting cue will be wrong every single night until it suddenly isn’t. Your stage manager will develop a thousand-yard stare by Wednesday. And at some point, a student will ask you what time rehearsal ends as if that is a question with a real answer.
And yet — somehow — the curtain goes up. It always does.
Tech week is brutal by nature, but a lot of the suffering is optional. Here’s how to run a tech week that actually prepares your students instead of just surviving it.
Before Tech Week Even Starts
The single biggest factor in how your tech week goes is how prepared you are before it begins. Directors who struggle in tech week almost always struggled to prepare for it.
Lock your blocking before you hit the stage. If your cast is still figuring out where to stand when the lighting board gets added, you’re in trouble. Tech week is for adding technical elements — not fixing acting problems.
Hold a paper tech before you go into the space. Sit down with your stage manager, lighting designer, and sound operator and walk through every single cue on paper before you ever call “go” in the booth. This takes two to three hours and saves ten.
Communicate your schedule clearly and early. Every student, parent, and crew member should have the tech week schedule at least two weeks in advance. Late arrivals and confused parents cost you more time than almost anything else.
Set expectations with your cast. Tech week is different from rehearsal. The pace is slower. There will be stops and starts. Students who don’t understand why they’re standing under a hot light for 20 minutes while the board op fixes a cue will get frustrated fast. Brief them ahead of time.
The Tech Week Schedule That Actually Works
There’s a standard progression to tech week that most experienced directors use for good reason. Here’s the framework:
Day 1 — Cue-to-cue (Q2Q) Go through the entire show stopping at every single technical cue — lights, sound, fly cues, everything. You are not running scenes. You are establishing where every cue lives. This is slow and tedious and completely necessary. Tell your cast to bring a book.
Day 2 — Stumble-through with tech Run the show from top to bottom with all technical elements for the first time. It will be messy. That’s fine. The goal is momentum, not perfection.
Day 3 — Work-through Go back and fix the problems from Day 2. This is your problem-solving day. Tackle your biggest issues first while everyone still has energy.
Day 4 — Full run Run the show as close to performance conditions as possible. Call notes at the end. Keep them tight — no more than 20 minutes.
Day 5 — Dress rehearsal Full costumes, full hair and makeup, full tech. Treat it like a performance. Invite a small audience if you can — a friendly crowd changes the energy in the room in ways that nothing else replicates.
How to Run an Efficient Tech Rehearsal
The biggest time killer in tech week isn’t the technical problems — it’s how you respond to them. Here’s how to stay efficient:
Use “hold” and “go” clearly. Every stop should be called with a clear “hold please” and every restart with a clear “let’s take it from [specific cue or line].” Vague direction creates confusion and eats your time.
Fix what you can from the house, not the stage. Every time you walk up on stage to adjust something, you lose five minutes. Solve as much as you can from your director’s table.
Give notes at the end, not in the middle. Unless something is completely broken, resist the urge to stop and give acting notes during tech. Write them down and deliver them at the end of the night. Your crew is waiting on you every time you stop.
Keep your director’s table organized. Script, cue sheet, note pad, water. That’s all you need. A cluttered table is a cluttered mind.
Protect your crew. Tech week is when crew members get treated like furniture. Don’t let it happen. Acknowledge their work publicly. Give them the same energy and respect you give your cast. The crew sets the tone for the entire backstage culture.
Managing the Emotional Temperature
Tech week has a way of turning normal, reasonable people into frazzled, short-fused versions of themselves. As the director, your emotional temperature sets the room’s emotional temperature. If you’re panicked, everyone panics. If you’re steady, people settle.
A few things that help:
Don’t skip meals. This sounds obvious until it’s 9pm on Wednesday and you realize you’ve had half a granola bar since noon. Eat real food. Make sure your student leaders do too.
Build in five-minute breaks. Every 90 minutes, stop. Let people use the bathroom, drink water, and decompress. You’ll get more out of the next 90 minutes than if you’d pushed through.
Have a quick reset ritual for your cast. Something brief — a breathing exercise, a physical warm-up, a silly ensemble game — that signals “we’re leaving whatever just happened behind and starting fresh.” It works.
Normalize the mess. Tech week is supposed to be imperfect. When you treat every mistake like a crisis, your students stop taking risks and start playing it safe. Tell them early and often: this is where we figure it out, and figuring it out is the job.
The Things That Go Wrong (And What to Do)
No tech week is clean. Here are the most common disasters and how to handle them:
A cue is completely wrong and you can’t figure out why. Stop trying to fix it in the moment. Mark it, move on, and troubleshoot it during a break or after rehearsal with just your board op. You do not need 40 people watching you debug a light board.
A costume isn’t ready. Have your cast rehearse in street clothes with a note about what costume will be there by dress. Never delay a run for a missing costume.
A student melts down. Pull them aside quietly, give them two minutes, and get them back in. Don’t make it a bigger moment than it needs to be. Check in with them after rehearsal privately.
Something breaks. Fix what you can, work around what you can’t, and keep moving. Opening night audiences have no idea what wasn’t working in tech. They only see what you show them.
Opening Night Is Closer Than It Feels
Somewhere around Wednesday of tech week, there is usually a moment where it all feels completely hopeless. The show feels too broken, the time feels too short, and the whole thing feels like a mistake.
That moment is a lie.
Every show that has ever opened has passed through that moment. It is a normal and necessary part of the process. Push through it. Your students are watching how you handle it — and they will take their cues from you.
The curtain will go up. The show will happen. And there will be a moment on opening night — there always is — where you forget about everything that went wrong and just watch your students do the thing they worked so hard to do.
That’s why you do tech week.
What’s your most memorable tech week disaster story? Drop it in the comments — the more chaotic, the better.