Behind the Scenes at Scots Spectacular: Meet the Scots Crew
When the lights go down at a school production, every eye is on the stage. Few in the audience notice the crew working in the dark just metres away, keeping the lights, sound, and scene changes running exactly to plan.
Scots Spectacular is Scots College’s annual music festival, and this year Aarav and Jewel from the Scots Crew take us behind the curtain of Scots College’s 2026 Scots Spectacular.
Most people who watch Scots Spectacular never think about the number of people who work tirelessly in the dark, ensuring that everything runs smoothly behind the scenes. This year’s crew included two lighting techs, two sound operators, two stage managers, and many stagehands. Between them, they were responsible for one job above all else: making sure every musician looked and sounded their best.
Preparing for opening night
Preparation for the show started a week before opening night. During rehearsals, the stage managers paid close attention to the performances, making note of every piece of equipment that needed to be moved, creating the game plan that we would all follow for a seamless show night. The sound team would listen carefully and adjust sound levels, often moving around the stage to reposition amps and microphones. Meanwhile, the lighting techs tested existing lights, added additional ones where needed, and fine-tuned each one until every inch of the stage was lit up perfectly so no performer was left in the dark.
Showtime: headsets, cue sheets, and teamwork
Once everything was prepared, it was showtime. Every performance runs on headsets, cue sheets, and, most importantly, teamwork – because backstage, time moves fast. Over our comms headsets, stage managers kept the crew a step ahead, reminding everyone what is coming next. Stagehands were always on their feet, ready to shift equipment or get performers where they needed to be, all while staying unseen and unheard. Every change must happen quickly and cleanly, snap after snap, because the moment something lags, the illusion of a performance that runs on its own breaks. The greatest achievement for a crew is when the audience never notices the work happening just a few feet away from them.
Staying calm when something goes wrong
Part way through, we realised that one of our communication headsets was not working properly and just could not be fixed. Instead of panicking, the crew stayed calm, as the rule backstage is to always take a deep breath and think clearly, no matter what is going wrong. The Events Prefect quickly worked through possible causes and traced it back to a switch backstage that had been flipped off. Within moments, the headset was working perfectly and the show carried on without a hitch. The audience never knew anything had gone wrong because the crew found a way to work around it and kept the show running smoothly.
The work you are not meant to see
By the time the curtains closed, the crew felt nothing but relief and pride, even though most of the crew’s work goes unnoticed, which is precisely the point. We joke around, we cover for one another when something goes wrong, and we celebrate together when a performance goes well. Scots Spectacular may belong to the performers on stage, but it runs on the crew working quietly behind it.
