Teri Pruitt has spent thirty years in the wings, eighteen of them on Wicked, making a live show land the same every night while nobody in the audience sees the effort. In this conversation, we follow her from a girl who was always someone's little sister to a woman who has made a craft, and now a business, out of the disciplines that keep a team alive under real pressure.
What does a lifetime of deliberately invisible work teach you about ego, pressure, and worth? Teri and I talk about why backstage was the first place she got to be herself, how you hold continuity and aliveness at the same time through the work nobody sees, and why she now insists on taking the work seriously without taking herself seriously. There are two stories you won't forget: a ringing phone in ancient Rome and a goat tail carried across a Broadway stage like a torch, and each carries a real lesson about care and repair. You'll leave with a cleaner way to think about your own team: hold the goal tightly, hold everything else, including yourself, lightly.
Teri Pruitt is a Broadway wardrobe professional with more than thirty years in live theatre, including roughly eighteen years on Wicked. She is the founder of Open the Aperture, a consultancy that brings theatrical solutions to business problems, taking companies backstage to learn how live performance handles pressure, teamwork and repair. Her talks run from a brown-bag lunch to a keynote, and they are funny before they are instructive.
Open the Aperture / Teri Pruitt
YouTube — “Behind the Magic of Wicked with Teri Pruitt”
GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.
Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.
Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.
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