Cue

The trigger for an action during the show, written down so that the person responsible for the action does not have to guess. Mic goes live, music up, video rolls, slide advances, lights down. Cues come in two kinds. A static cue fires at a time on the clock. A dynamic cue fires on something observable in the room, most often a line somebody says out loud.

The distinction matters more than it sounds, because shows drift. Guests run long, an opener lands so well it earns an extra minute, and every clock cue behind that point is now wrong. A cue written as “on ‘thanks for having me,’ music up” survives all of that. The two properties a good cue needs are that it is easy to recognise as it happens, and that it cannot be confused with any other cue on the sheet.

Source: Live production practice. Stagetimer’s run-of-show guide is the clearest free write-up: a cue must be “easily recognizable” and “distinct enough for it to not be confused with another cue,” and because “sometimes speakers overrun or underrun,” producers use dynamic cues, meaning pointers that are independent of the clock. Its stated reason is that for timing actions like lighting changes and sound, “being even 10 seconds off can ruin the accuracy of those cues.”

First used in: 2.6 · The paper stack.