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‘Bright Star’

Opens March 24

“You ready?”

It was a shout that could barely be heard over the screeching of power tools at the Cort Theater. A small army of stagehands hoisted scenery, worked on a lighting rig and tossed electrical cables to one another. This was load-in, the part of the process when technicians have full run of a theater before the actors show up. And, from three stories above the stage, Scott Jackson was trying to coordinate with a colleague far below to be sure cables were being connected properly, the cacophony an obvious obstacle to their efforts.

The lobby was stuffed with crates. Inside, makeshift tables — boards placed over blocks of seats — were scattered around the orchestra, supporting computers and other gadgets. Behind one table sat Larry Morley, the technical supervisor, calmly overseeing the whole shebang.

“Bright Star,” a bluegrass-tinged musical written by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, is hardly Mr. Morley’s first rodeo — he’s been doing this kind of work since the mid-’70s. “Broadway theaters are quite small, which offers challenges,” he said in a quick conversation punctuated with squawks from his hand-held radio. Compared with some other places he has worked, including the Kennedy Center in Washington, where “Bright Star” had a recent run, the 1,082-seat Cort is rather petite, especially when it comes to wing space.

“It becomes more and more important to schedule things in sequence and hopefully keep everybody moving forward,” he said. “But there are definitely times when people are standing and waiting if they can’t get to their next task because someone else is in that physical space, or doing something that has to happen first.”

Elsewhere, Scott Sanders, the production sound engineer, was fine-tuning the speaker system. “Next Tuesday is when we first see the cast onstage,” Mr. Sanders said. “At 1 o’clock in the afternoon, everything has to be ready from soup to nuts.”

Will it? “Yeah,” Mr. Morley said confidently, before adding, “I mean, there’s still a lot to do.”

— Steven McElroy