Cue sheet

The document the person calling the show reads from. It is the run of show with everything removed that is not a trigger, which leaves four things: mic cues, music cues, slide advances, and any lines. No vendor arrivals, no badge counts, no catering timings. The point is that under pressure, in a dark room, the person calling cues should be able to find the next one without reading past anything else.

At community scale the cue sheet and the run of show are usually the same sheet with a cue column, and that is fine while you are the only person calling cues, because the sheet is really a backup copy of what is already in your head. It stops being fine the moment somebody else is calling. A live podcast is the usual forcing event: the host is in the chair with a mic on and cannot also decide when the music fades.

Source: Live-production practice, stated plainly in We & Goliath’s show-flow template guide: “The person calling your show doesn’t need the full run of show but rather a cue sheet… focused on four things: mic cues, music cues, slide advances, and any lines.” Naming note: some vendor guides, Stagetimer’s among them, treat “run of show” and “cue sheet” as the same document. That is accurate at small scale and stops being accurate as soon as two people are reading two different papers, so it is worth asking a supplier which one they mean.

First used in: 2.6 · The paper stack.