Lisa Dawn Cave is production manager for super-popular ‘Frozen’ now playing at the Benedum

LISA DAWN CAVE

by Genea L. Webb, For New Pittsburgh Courier

There are so many other positions in theater besides being in front of the stage.

As the production supervisor/production manager of Disney’s “Frozen,” The Lion King” and “Aida,” Lisa Dawn Cave wears many hats. 

She’s had a love for theater ever since she was a young girl. She loved listening to music and singing with all the records and dancing even though she lacked formal training. Her mother saw her love for the stage and enrolled her in the High School for Performing Arts, a public school in Manhattan (New York City). She auditioned and got accepted into the school. That’s where she received her formal dance training as well as some acting.

Following high school. Cave enrolled in State University of New York at Purchase as a dance major where she received her BFA in dance. She immediately started auditioning for roles and danced and sang professionally in both Broadway and national tours for about 10 years. But in 1994, a car accident cut her acting career short. She decided to move behind the scenes in the profession she adored. Her first show as a stage manager was a few months later in that year.

Fast forward to 2020, and Cave and two of her professional stage management colleagues, Beverly Jenkins and Jimmy Lee Smith, created “Broadway and Beyond Access to Stage Managers of Color,” to connect managers to industry leaders to help people of color be considered for stage management jobs.

“We started that because we realized after the pandemic that there are more people out there than we know, we just haven’t opened the door and given a chance to,” Cave told the New Pittsburgh Courier. “My colleagues and I happened to be the very few stage managers that literally worked on Broadway for years and we noticed there were only a few of us, there were not a lot—there were less than 10. You can have as many as 20-plus shows on Broadway at one time and each musical has three stage managers on them and each play has two… We were able to use our star power and say to them, if you are willing to open up the door, we are willing to bring them to you.”

Cave said that there were many times when she or her colleagues would get the call for a job and when they couldn’t do the job—if they wanted someone of color—they would ask Cave for a referral. “We realized there wasn’t an organization for stage managers of color who were ready to work and who’d been working for years but never got their chance to break lose in certain venues,” Cave said.

During the 2021-2022, season Cave and her crew were able to get 50-70 stage managers of color prominent interviews. That led to about 15 of them getting jobs working on Broadway that season.

“It was pretty amazing,” Cave said. “For some of them, it was their first job—they were working off Broadway and were trying to get into Broadway and never could and now they did.”

Cave continued: “It has really boomed quicker than we thought. The industry professionals keep coming and the stage managers keep coming. We don’t promise anyone a job; we are there to have you meet people. We give access to people that they probably weren’t able to meet before and then they get to know you and if there’s a position that they think you’re right for, then there’s a possibility you can get a gig.”

Cave, an avid hiker, bike rider, and nature lover, has a wealth of knowledge about “Frozen,” dating back to 2016 when it was just a reading. She has the knowledge of why things are the way they are, what things are not on the stage and what changes are made. She put the show together as a pre-Broadway production and then the Broadway production as the production stage manager.

“Frozen” is showing at the Benedum Center, Downtown, through Oct. 16. The uber-popular production has a message of “being empowered,” Cave told the Courier. “The message of love between you and a sibling; it has diversity in it, so there’s that love between different cultures…it shows at the beginning that people think one thing, but they end up realizing another at the end, and that, in itself, is wonderful.”

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