For amateur and community theatre
Seven weeks.
Forty volunteers.
One evening a week.
The work that eats a production isn’t the creative work. It’s splitting the script into sides, working out who is needed on Tuesday, and re-issuing everything after a cut. The Half Call is built to do that part, and keep it current.
Thirty days free, in full. No card. Every member of your company included, on every plan, always.
CALL SHEET — RIVERSIDE PLAYERS
The Importance of Being Earnest
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TUESDAY 2 SEPTEMBER · 7.30pm
Corn Exchange, rehearsal room 2
UNITS 4–9 (Act I, from Algernon's
entrance to the muffins)
CALLED Ana Ilie ALGERNON
Peter Hardcastle JACK
Joyce Okafor LADY BRACKNELL
Tom Reid LANE
NOT CALLED Margaret Wills, Sam Petrie
PROPS cigarette case, muffin dish,
tea things
NOTE Ana — bring the revised side,
your speech on p.14 is cut.
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Marta Ilie · SM · 07700 900461
What actually eats the seven weeks
None of it is the reason anybody joined
Marking up who says what
Photocopying the script and going through it with a highlighter, part by part, so every actor has their lines and the cue line above each one.
Who is needed on Tuesday
Every week, cross-referencing eight people against thirty people’s shift patterns, exams and holidays — then typing it up and sending it.
Keeping the prop list honest
Blocking decisions made three weeks ago in a hall nobody wrote notes about, and a props table that quietly stopped matching them.
Re-issuing after a cut
Forty lines out of Act III, and every side, every call sheet and every running time is now slightly wrong.
Every one of those is derivable from two things you already have: the script, and a grid of who is free when. Nobody derives them mechanically, so a volunteer does it by hand on a Sunday.
What The Half Call is for
One parse of the script, and the paperwork stops being work
Take the script your company has already licensed. Read it once into acts, units, cues, characters, entrances, exits and the props the text actually names. From that single reading, the rest falls out — and stays right when the script changes.
Sides, from your script
Every actor gets their own lines with the cue line above each one. Make a cut and they are meant to regenerate on their own, with a note saying what changed — instead of thirty-four people working from three different versions.
Calls that make sense
The Half Call knows which units each part appears in and who is free. The point is a week of rehearsals that doesn’t drag a four-line part across the county for one scene, and a call sheet that goes out on Sunday rather than Tuesday afternoon.
Off-book, honestly
Actors learn lines in the app, and the stage manager sees progress by unit. Not who is slacking — which scenes need another run before the tech.
The budget, in one place
Props, costumes and set: what the text requires, what you chose, estimated against actual. The treasurer gets one number instead of a carrier bag of receipts.
Where the product is today
The Half Call is not finished, and we are not going to pretend it is
It is being built now, in the open. The page you are reading describes what The Half Call is for; it is not a claim that all of it works this evening. Amateur companies get promised software constantly and get delivered very little of it, so here is the state of it, plainly:
- Being built The company workspace and the scheduler — members, casting, availability, calls, call sheets, the budget. This is the part that makes a stage manager keep using it, so it is the part being built first.
- Not yet built Reading a publisher’s PDF into acts, units and cues; generating sides; line learning; the prompt book’s script column; everything the assistant does. These are specified in detail and are not finished.
- Never Any way for a licensed script to leave your workspace as a file, any public link to one, and any charge per company member. Those are settled decisions, not a roadmap.
If you want to be one of the first companies in, start one now and we will tell you the moment each part is ready. If you would rather wait until it is all standing up, say so and we will write to you then — that is a completely reasonable answer.
You bring the script. We never hold a library.
The Half Call is your company’s own workspace, not a distributor. The script you put in is one you have licensed, it never leaves the app as a file, and access ends when the production closes — the same way the licence does.
The thing every other tool gets wrong
The person with the enthusiasm isn’t the person with the card
A stage manager finds a tool like this at eleven at night, because she is the one typing call sheets. The money lives with a treasurer, and spending is approved by a committee that meets once a month in a church hall. Asking her for a card on the first screen ends it there — not on price, on who she is.
So everything up to paying is free and keeps its work. She sets up the whole production first, and what she takes to the committee is a month of real work rather than a brochure.
Set it up before you ask anyone for money
Add your members, cast the parts, plan the rehearsals. Thirty days, everything included, no card. Decide when you have something worth deciding about.