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BY LAURA MOORE SOUTHRIDGE CLASS OF 2002
As Southridge presented Oscar Wilde’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest, Laura Moore (Class of 2002), reflects on her own experience as stage manager for the same show during her time as a Southridge student more than two decades ago, and shares life lessons she gained while participating in our school’s theatre program.

I always knew I wanted to work in theatre. One of my most vivid childhood memories is standing in the wings of a theatre during a dance recital. I was four years old, dressed in a bright turquoise spandex suit, about to perform onstage for the first time. What strikes me about that moment, even all these years later, is how little I cared about actually going onstage. I wasn’t excited or nervous. But I was completely entranced with the whirlwind of activity around me. People were running around wearing headsets or costumes. Holding clipboards or props. There was an electricity in the air, and I have never forgotten that first rush of being backstage and seeing a live production come together. It’s a rush I’ve been chasing ever since.
I was a latecomer to Southridge, arriving in the fall of 2001 for my final year of high school. It was somewhere in that first week of school that I auditioned for the fall musical, Little Shop of Horrors, and I was cast as one of the Ronettes, a trio of street urchins who sing entirely in three-part harmony. Which was unfortunate, because at that point in my life (and to this day actually), I had no idea how to sing in harmony. As a result, my role was recast, but I still wanted to be part of the show, taking on the various smaller parts and one-liners. More importantly, I started taking on more of the work that was going on backstage. And I loved it.
So much so, that when it was announced that Southridge would be doing a spring production of The Importance of Being Earnest, I didn’t even consider auditioning. Instead, I asked if I could be the assistant director, and eventually took on the role that I would later discover was called the stage manager. One Oscar Wilde production later, I was hooked. I graduated from Southridge in 2002 and went to Simon Fraser University to study film production and technical theatre with a specialization in stage management. After graduating in 2006, I threw myself into the Vancouver theatre scene, working every possible backstage job that I could. In 2007, I joined my first national tour as the assistant stage manager for Axis Theatre’s The Number 14. And in 2008, I was promoted to stage manager and took The Number 14 on my first international tour. I continued to work primarily as a stage manager for the next several years, and I loved every minute of it. I was working in theatre, getting paid to travel, and watching incredibly talented artists perform every night. I was also working incredibly long hours, and life on the road isn’t nearly as glamorous as the movies make it out to be. But I was still very aware of how fortunate I was to be doing what I loved. The 2010 Vancouver Olympics were a turning point in my career. I was hired by NBC Olympics to help run the logistics of their engineering department, and to this day it’s one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. I quickly discovered that all my skills that I had been honing as a stage manager were completely transferable, as sports broadcasting is basically one big live production. Except instead of performing to an audience of a couple hundred, you’re broadcasting to millions of people around the world. It was a pressure cooker, but I loved it, and I went on to work the 2012 Olympics in London and the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Paris.
Speaking of Paris, in 2014, I moved to the City of Light for what was supposed to be a four-month-long bucket list adventure. Instead, over the past eight and a half years I’ve made France my permanent home. I’ve also transitioned yet again, taking my stage management skills to the world of event production. I work primarily in the social good space, working on events for organizations like The Rockefeller Foundation, the Bayer Foundation, the Skoll Foundation, and Ending Pandemics. Different industry, same skills. And there’s not a day onsite that I don’t use something I learned from working in theatre. In fact, I was recently reminded of something that I learned during my time backstage with The Importance of Being Earnest at Southridge.
During one of our performances, a curtain fell during the first act, which meant it was blocking the slideshow projection that was running during the show. I decided to fix it during the intermission by attempting to tie it up from above. Unfortunately, no one out front knew this. So while I was up in the loft tying up the rope (with several actors up ladders helping me), someone decided that intermission was over and the lights suddenly dimmed to start Act II. In that moment, I learned the very important lesson that when it comes to live productions, there always has to be one person in charge of calling the show, and everyone else has to be in constant communication with that one person. Otherwise, you might find yourself being prompted to start the show when the rest of the team is far from ready to do so. Something I saw happen recently when I watched an MC at an event introducing a famous speaker who wasn’t in the room yet. It was an incredibly awkward moment to witness, and it happened because there wasn’t a dedicated person calling the show. Something Southridge and The Importance of Being Earnest taught me when I was 17 years old. Today, I still work in theatre as the production manager and in-house stage manager for a theatre company based out of Quebec, and in the summer of 2022, we produced The Masks of Oscar Wilde at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Twenty years after watching my classmates perform as Lady Bracknell and Jack Worthing, I got to watch the same scene play out again every day in Edinburgh. It’s amazing how life can sometimes come full circle. We’re currently preparing to debut a brand-new show about Christopher Marlowe at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, and in the fall, we’ll be taking both shows on the road. I wish I could tell four-year-old me that chasing the rush of live production never gets old.
I want to extend a huge congratulations to the cast and crew of this year’s revival of The Importance of Being Earnest. I’m sad I couldn’t see it in person, but I know you all did an incredible job. I was also thrilled to speak with you all over Zoom and recount my Oscar Wilde stories from over 20 years ago. It makes me really happy to know that Southridge’s incredible theatre tradition has continued all these years.
