Behind the stage lights and the glitter there's a whole other world of madness happening, and Noella Kaye is usually in the thick of it.
Dressing and undressing people in the dark, repairing broken spears and umbrellas, making fake snow and gluing bottles to drinks trays.
Noella has a few stories of emergency repairs done in the dark while a heaving audience laughs and claps, oblivious to the silent panic happening out of sight.
She reveals the deadliest enemy of the props lady - the cleaning lady.
Take sausages.
“For the play Some Shiny Days we had to have five barbecues lined up every night with three sausages on each one,” Noella says.
“We cooked them carefully, and we put them on a tray and then put them in the fridge at Westside all ready to go for opening night.
“The first night we were setting up - and there were no sausages. The cleaner saw them in the fridge and thought they were someone's lunch that had been left for a few days so she threw them out,” Noella says.
Fortunately, Noella - STAG's Mrs Fix-it - was there to take charge of the disappearing sausage disaster.
“We ran out and bought kabanas - nobody spotted the difference,” she says.
Then came the strange case of the vanishing snow.
“For another play we had to have snow so we got some packing cases and took out the bits of foam - that made perfect snow.
“We had to sweep it up every night and leave it backstage for the next night. One night I couldn't be bothered sweeping it up so I left it overnight, and that's when the cleaners came and swept it all away and threw it out.
“So we quickly cut up some plastic drinking cups into little squares. It looked like snow, but unfortunately when it fell to the ground it went tinkle tinkle tinkle,” she laughs.
To solve these tricky situations down the years, Noella has created her own props lady emergency repair kit.
“You've gotta have gaffer tape, a hot glue gun, black texta, spare batteries and a safety pin, needles and cotton. A Stanley knife is pretty handy too. That will get you through,” she says.
Whenever Noella gets a weird or wacky request, she relies on a network of friends, op shop searchers, tradies and community connections to come up with an answer.
“For two shows we had to have a real coffin. For anyone working in a funeral parlour a coffin is not something unusual - but for anyone else, they're hard to get. People don't have them in their garage.
“But I asked around - and somebody knew somebody. Somebody always knows somebody,” she says.
For a fake arm with a hand attached, Noella travelled to Melbourne to find one in a magic shop in Collins St.
Then there's the vomit bag.
For the play God of Carnage a cast member had to projectile spew from a couch.
“We filled a cushion with soupy stuff that looked like the real thing when you squeezed it. Two other people took charge of that - but I had to clean it up every night,” she says.
For the musical Wicked, she had to come up with a bottle of green elixir that glowed in the spotlight.
“It was a really important part of the show - and I spent weeks working out how to make it glow. I was thinking lights, glitter, little bulbs - then one day I picked up some washing-up liquid and the sun shone through it. I thought I wonder how that would glow under lights? And it did,” she says.
For the play Calendar Girls, based on a group of women who decide to pose nude for a charity calendar, Noella had to make outsized props - big boxes, big parcels, big baskets of oranges - to cover the ladies’ naughty bits.
“That was so funny - after a while nobody noticed the bare ladies, you're just too busy. But the audience thought it was hilarious,” she says.
Noella says after a quarter of a century of working backstage and collecting a treasure trove of fake arms, vomit bags and little green bottles - her greatest treasures are the memories of people she has met along the way.
“I've met so many different people I would never meet in my normal life, musicians, doctors, lawyers and tradies - all sorts of talented and interesting people,” she says.
