Fall 2018
AT WORK WITH
By Becca Nadler
The scariest and most fun part of the job for Saturday Night Live stage manager Chris Kelly usually happens just after the post-dress-rehearsal notes meeting with director Don Roy King and producer Lorne Michaels. "There's a window of about 20 minutes between that meeting and when the live show starts where we've got to solve a lot of problems," he says.
On a recent episode, Kelly needed to hide a prop possum in a cabinet alongside actress Kate McKinnon with just minutes to go before air. "I go to props and say, 'Give me a roll of gaffer's tape and some cloth and give me the [possum],'" he remembers. "I've got to move stuff out of the way to get to this cabinet and I'm duct-taping, putting the [possum] in. We sneak Kate in and I go, 'I built this thing, it'll work, good luck,' and I watch with my innards knotted up. If I do it right, I'm on an adrenaline roll that doesn't stop until the show's over."
The pouch held, but because SNL runs at such a frenetic pace, "There's no time to really enjoy it," says Kelly. "You just roll right into the monologue. It's that kind of stuff which is fun. I dig it."