by Ben Quach ’27; featured image by Nathan V Nguyen ’26
Directing her third show ever, Ms. Pauline Locsin-Kanter brought A Chorus Line to life in Bellarmine’s fall musical of 2025. Set over the course of one day, the story follows a set of Broadway dancers, coming from many walks of life, as they audition for a spot on a chorus line. The show explores the personalities, backgrounds, hopes, and fears that have shaped their lives and careers. From brutally honest depictions of life to suggestive dialogue, it’s a glimpse into the tough and ugly, unfiltered narrative behind the scenes of the grandeur found on Broadway.
To learn more about what went into putting such a unique and thematically intense production together, I talked with Stage Manager Sam Lanier ’26 and Assistant Stage Manager Joshua Cayanes ’27.
On his role in the production, Sam explained, “It’s a little bit different than it is professionally, just because I’m a kid. So traditionally, a stage manager is basically all the logistics. So, it’s the quintessential non-creative role in a theatrical production – contracts, schedules, attendance, organizing finance of the costumes – like “Hey, you need to bring this element of your costume.’ The way I see it is, I am the great filter, right?…And at Bellarmine, costumes will sometimes come down to the cast, but in a real circumstance, Costumes isn’t one floor up. Costumes is across town. So sometimes they would message me, and I would say, ‘Hey, Costumes needs this from you. This one needs to happen.’ Or ‘Sound needs this from you. You guys need to wear a base layer for first for cue-to-cue tomorrow.’”
But it doesn’t only “go from the creatives down,” as Sam put it. It’s also his responsibility to empower and represent the voices going up the ladder. “Particularly at an educational institution, I’m a boy who goes to this school [working] with girls who don’t go to this school.”
Especially when it came to the conflict between the theatre and the Bellarmine administration’s choice to censor parts of the show, “it was trying to communicate things that are needed and avoid getting too…personally involved in it. So, that was a big lesson that I learned is, ‘you can just communicate needs and not be worried about them.’ Instead of saying, ‘Hey, I’m really worried about the mics. Are we gonna have enough mics for all the line dancers?’ I can say, ‘Hey, the director is feeling anxious. I wanted to relay that to you because they wanted to relate it to you themselves, and I want to protect you from that.’ I think it’s definitely a lot of logistical and communication work.”
Sam also explained the sort of shift in mindset he had to go through. “I consider myself a scenic carpenter primarily, and a lot of that you can front load. If I don’t want to be worried about getting the set done during tech week, I can put in x extra hours to get x fewer hours during tech week. Whereas, with A Chorus Line, with stage managing, there were things that were needed of me, not in general, but in the moment,” he described. “I had this really interesting experience where…I put [down the thrust] twenty minutes early because I knew I was gonna be really busy in the twenty minutes that it needed to be down. But that was a safety hazard. There were things that depended on me not doing something before, but in the moment. There were a bunch of times that I learned that – I tried to set the assistant directors up with music, with our speaker, and our speaker will often go from the analog mode to Bluetooth mode without asking…So, you need to do that in the moment. You do that five to three minutes before, and so it’s a lot of bustling around. It’s very nonlinear, non-constant the amount of effort you need to put. So, there are moments during rehearsal where you can do math homework, and there are moments during rehearsal where you absolutely have to be there, almost to the extent that you need to be operating on the level of two different people.”
When asked what he felt went most successfully with the production, Sam responded, “I really enjoyed the freedom and the liberty that Pauline trusted me with, but also, I’m not an actors person – I’ve kind of got a limited battery, and it’s really nerve-wracking for me to be in the middle of one conversation while two other conversations are happening, and one of the people says my name and then I feel this need to be present, and that’s really stressful for me. But…we have what’s called a dry run – it’s basically right before Tech Week, and the technicians sit in on a run of the show. I think I grabbed Pierce and Joshua and Mariana, so three of our technicians, and I was like, “Hey, let me give you a couple of things, like just whatever you can do. Let me tell you a couple of things that need to be done today.’ Because in the past, I’d had to ask actors that weren’t in a scene, or assistant directors who can do about as much as they can do, but they’re also trying to take notes, so there’s limitations there. Just being able to give some things to techies and telling them once and them getting done – it was really a beautiful thing…When I see that integration with tech and actors, I see it in the throes of it. But I had been with tech and I had been with actors the whole time, so I felt like I was the linchpin, the wishbone, almost between those two things. And just seeing it synthesize was really, really beautiful. And knowing that [it was] me diligently taking notes at rehearsal and noting when ballet bars had to come on and off.”
A testament to that skill and level of detail, Sam is especially proud of the scrim – the semi-transparent curtain that came down mid-stage. He explained how coordinating the cues for it were particularly difficult because they wanted it to be timed to come out as people are walking up the stairs. “Frankly, actors are not incompetent, but so much of their brain power is dedicated to playing a role, that they can’t find their light or avoid a thing coming in over their head, and just seeing technicians be able to supplement that requirement – there had been a missing piece and it was completed, and it felt very, very rewarding.”
Other highlights include the “The Music and the Mirror,” the song where there’s four mirrors in a semicircle around Cassie [played by Kaleah Taylor, Mitty ’26]. “I love the music – it’s jazz-inspired – and those mirrors were particularly hard to get done. I think so much of this is just the rewarding element of seeing things happens that you put blood and tears into.”
Sam especially enjoyed the bookends of the show: both the opening and closing numbers.
As the show opens on a rehearsal scene, the dramatic lighting created intriguing visual interest that pulled viewers in. “I really like how that lighting works too, where there’s…red front light and blue backlight, and it gives these performers this eerie look that’s really, really pretty. And I was really worried about it, because normally you do that with footlights. On the proscenium, normally you wouldn’t have a thrust stage that’s brought down to have an orchestra. Normally, moving from upstage to downstage, you would have the stage and then a strip of orchestra, and then another strip where you could put lights that would aim up at the performers,” Sam explained in detail. “But because…it wasn’t straight, we couldn’t mount floor lights. And we just don’t have floor lights to mount the first place. I was worried that it wasn’t gonna look good. And it looked great.”
But just as a show must begin, so to must it eventually, inevitably, unfortunately, end. “The final number – those gold jackets, looked so ugly the first time we ran them, and they were wrinkly, and some of them didn’t fit. And Vegas, the fan backdrop, the fan hanger – we had to reprogram it because some of them were broken, and…there were so many things that had to come together. And it really looked so simple on stage. It was just one big thing, yellow light on top, and funny costumes,” Sam gave insight to the struggle behind the scenes. “But even something as simple as that had so many things that happened [in] between them.”
Case in point, incredibly, there isn’t a single costume change in the entire show. No one changes costume until the gold jackets are revealed at the very end. “The first time we ran it, it took 150 seconds…and there’s this weird piano Vamp that I can’t remember right now, but it kept looping [during that time]…And it was the most eerie, like your game is downloading an 80-gigabyte file or something. But then we figured it out, and we realized that we just needed the first four people to be changed, not everyone. We didn’t need to wait for everybody. And Josh was the one who gave me the call. And every night, it kept getting earlier and earlier, and we got sub-30 on closing night. By opening we had it down to like 40, but we got sub 30 on closing night, and it was really, really so gorgeous. And there’s a lights cue that happens at the top of it, and then the mirror comes out and Vegas, it’s just gorgeous…And I think that was a very pretty moment, and I’m happy that it also took effort because sometimes there’s this disconnect between ‘things are really hard’ and also ‘they just look okay’, but this one was really hard and looked gorgeous, so I’m really happy with the way it turned out.”
“I was one of the assistant stage managers for the show,” Joshua explained his role in addition to helping with the build for the show. Because the building itself was relatively straightforward with just rolling mirrors and a hanging mirror, he points to this being his first time in a leadership position as one of the biggest struggles.
“It was kind of challenging, kind of interesting, because it was the first time I’ve had a kind of leadership position on the show, because I normally I’ve just been like a stagehand for most of the other shows. It’s the first time I was officially an assistant stage manager, because secondly, I was one for Network last year, but they didn’t put me in the program as one – I don’t know that counts but, unofficially, I was one, so it was fun getting to just learn more – it’s mostly a leadership thing, because you’re reviewing the script, you’re the one that’s following along and telling people what to do and put stuff on.”
Reflecting on the successes of the production, he mentioned how “even though the set was pretty bare, I think that it still looks really good. That was pretty successful. I can always talk about band. The lighting was good…it all went well.”
A product of that success was the series of montages in the middle of the show, displaying emotions, stories, and conflicts of and between the characters in a beautifully intertwined manner. “I think that’s really fun just because you get to hear everyone’s stories and that’s kind of like the point the show. Even the background singers, they still have really interesting stories to tell. That’s what they’re trying to do, even with all the overlapping voices and stuff. And I like the ending. I think that the ending is really cool with the big lights and the golden outfits. It was really fun, very fast, very theatrical. And then, I also liked the one really big solo dance number: ‘The Music and the Mirror’ with Kaleah. I think that one’s really fun. Even though I can’t really see much because I’m from the side, I think it’s still one of the really good songs.”
There is definitely a lot to say and a lot that has been said about the show and its content. From its various themes to the use of suggestive language and strong dialogue, there’s so many aspects, big and small to touch upon. Censorship of lines from the show, most significantly lyrics from “Dance: Ten; Looks: Three” sung by Val [played by Ivy Osment, Los Gatos HS ’26], has sparked a great deal of discussion and emotion.
To honor everything that there is to say about the show, I want to be able to display all of what there is to say. Follow to the next page to read what Sam and Josh had to say.