This is an amalgam of two clips I posted earlier — the video of the opening number at this year's Tony Awards, plus the video of director Glenn Weiss in the booth, calling shots at a mad pace. Most TV directors go through their entire careers without ever doing something like this on live television with but one chance to get it right. I think Mr. Weiss did an astounding job. Everyone who worked on that number did.
Watching the two videos in sync, you may get an idea of what a TV director did in the old days…and does now in fewer and fewer instances. Very few shows are live these days and when they aren't, it seems to make sense in most instances to just record the feeds from all the cameras and then select the shots later when they can take their time and try many different combinations. Weiss obviously had all his shots carefully planned during the number and he had his script marked to indicate to cut to Camera 4 on this word, Camera 7 on that word, etc.
But when they hit the end of the song, the cameras are deployed to get certain shots of the stage and audience during the applause — which I think went on a lot longer than they'd expected — and that's when Weiss starts ad-libbing, looking at what his cameraguys are giving him and making split-second decisions. I'll bet he wishes he'd cut back to Neil instead of to that audience shot of Megan Hilty so he could have gotten Mr. Harris's line — "Well, that's our budget" — completely on-screen but other than that, I don't see a single misstep in the whole thing…