About the drills, the scripts and the text
Stage management is learned in a rehearsal room, where a student gets perhaps one chance a week to write a blocking note at the speed a director speaks it. This site hands that chance over and over: a note arrives, you place the actor and write the shorthand, and the grader names what you missed.
Borrowed dialogue, invented staging
The two halves of a drill come from different places and the difference matters. The dialogue is real: 3 public domain ebooks supply the 14 scenes drawn from 4 plays, each cited on the scene by its ebook number so you can read the original. Every scene comes from a public domain script on Project Gutenberg, cited by its ebook number. The staging, the ground plans and the cues are invented for practice. The 137 blocking notes, the ground plans and every cue were written for this site; no production's prompt book was copied and no director's staging is reproduced. The 6 guides list, in their own Sources block, the material each one rests on.
Holding the dialogue to its source
The ebooks are kept unchanged, licence headers included, under tests/fixtures/gutenberg/. A test file, src/data/scenes/fidelity.test.ts, runs under npm test and asserts that every shipped line appears word for word in the ebook it cites and is given to the character the play gives it to. Punctuation and quote styles are normalised; nothing else is. The staging is invented, so there is nothing to hold it to.
Who is behind it
A lone independent developer, with no company or institution, builds and runs Cuedrill. The site went by Spikemark until October 2026. The same developer also makes Showorder for recital running orders, ReadTheSet for construction drawing practice and Placardset for hazmat placard drills.
Each guide is credited to Cuedrill, with no individual byline, and the author named in its schema markup is the site's organization. No stage manager, director, designer or instructor is credited, and no union membership, qualification or production history is claimed.
What a score here is worth
Cuedrill is a practice tool, not a substitute for a stage management course or for the conventions of your own production. A graded drill is practice, not a qualification: it carries no credit, no certification and no standing with a union, a school or a theatre,. The shorthand it marks is one common convention among several, so where your own production, department or house style differs, theirs is the one to write. It is not a prompt book you can run a show from, it does not hold a real production's paperwork, and it gives no advice on safety, on working time or on anything that belongs to a technical director. Any name you type stays in this browser and is uploaded nowhere. No performers' or stage managers' union or association, play publisher, licensing house, school or theatre is connected to this site.
Published .
Where to start
Everyone gets the same blocking drill on a given day, at no charge. For the notation and the calling vocabulary, work through the guide hub; the obvious opener is the notation guide. Corrections: [email protected].