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Caldwell relaxes on these junkets, joking, shopping, making friends. But once back home and inside the theater, says former Production Assistant Seamus Curran, "Sarah goes through people like water." Especially stage managers. "She eats them," says Lighting Designer Helmsley. The stage manager must follow schedules meticulously and see that everyone else does too. It is not an easy task when the boss disregards any regimen. Caldwell may rehearse her singers from morning to midnight, then keep a crew on until 4 or 5 a.m. for lighting rehearsals. During the latter, says Helmsley, "she invariably goes to sleep.
So you wake her up to get a decision. She goes back to sleep. You wake her up. She goes back to sleep."
On occasion Caldwell will tell the last man out of the theater to lock her in, then gaze for hours at the stage (and boxes, which she regularly uses as an extension of the stage), trying to figure out a way to adjust that small rectangle to her large vision. She has been known to doze off—one time lying in a heap of curtains in an aisle —and be ready to go the next morning.
That some people attribute her round-theclock hours to her lack of organization is something she resents emphatically. "We don't have a theater of our own," she says. "When we rent one we only have it for twelve days before a production. We have to bring in everything to make the place an opera house, and there is so much to be done that it is necessary to work in the theater 24 hours a day." So necessary, in fact, that her associates are regularly dispatched to bring her everything from hamburgers and Cokes to pantyhose. "Everyone around her has made at least one pantyhose run," says one amused staffer.
Caldwell is never more alive than when rehearsing. That, of course, is when she accomplishes most of her actual work. As the lights dim, she will chortle, "Ho ho ho, magic time," and begin to study the stage through those Thespian prisms that pass for eyes. One of her greatest but least appreciated strengths is her sense of proportion, or scale. In The Trojans Sarah made the horse as big as she could on her small stage, but was still not satisfied with the effect. Who finally emerged from the horse? Midgets and children costumed as soldiers. Sarah gets around surprisingly well for a 300-pounder. Often she resembles a great mother whale with a school of pilot fish circling her. "Yup, nope, yup, yup," she mumbles to a series of rapid-fire questions. When noisemakers get out of hand, she shouts: "Will you quell the rebellion backstage!"
If Caldwell is hard on everybody, she is harder on herself.
The final rehearsal for Verdi's Don Carlos in 1973 lasted nine hours. The orchestra call was only for five, and on the dot the players got up and walked out. A pianist picked up where they had left off, and Caldwell went on conducting, barely missing a beat, giving cues right and left to the absent musicians. When the pianist dropped out after two hours, another took over.