By Marta Hummel [News-Record.com, 29 October 2005]

Opera, the highest of high art, is decidedly low-tech, at least as far as how a production is managed. Stage crews build sets without knowing an actor's height and weight. And rebuild them when Juliet turns out to be 250 pounds instead of 150.

Stage managers and bevies of assistants photocopy hundreds of pages of scores with hand-scribbled directions for lighting and sound and re-copy them when the directions change. Actors generally work from memory and hand written notes about their stage directions.