NEW YORK — It's five minutes to show time, and Hugh Jackman's microphone cord is too short. A sound technician rushes past, in search of another.
Outside the stage door, a makeup artist frantically tries to talk his way through security, where guards have just run out of backstage passes.
And in a spacious dressing room just off the green room, Sally the camel is being primped for her big entrance — as Jackman's escort for the production number "Not the Boy Next Door."
Welcome to backstage at Radio City Music Hall, where the Tony Awards were presented Sunday night.
"It may seem chaotic, but it's organized chaos," says Sherry Cohen, a stage manager for "Mamma Mia!" who is moonlighting as an escort for winners and presenters as they leave the stage.
There are literally hundreds of staff flitting about behind the scenes — everyone from lighting designers and producers to caterers who stock the green room with gourmet brownies and finger sandwiches. Even the orchestra sits behind a scrim several hundred feet beyond the main stage.
And then there are people like Cohen, whose job it is to navigate the confusion.
She nimbly guides dazed winners past thickets of television monitors and stagehands pushing sets into the wings. One of her charges, Idina Menzel — fresh from capturing the Tony for best actress in a musical for "Wicked" — needs time to collect herself before facing reporters, so she stands quietly backstage, watching a monitor flash technical instructions.
"I'm in another world right now," she confides breathlessly. "I'm just looking at the screens and thinking what pretty pictures those words are forming."
Disoriented winners are a backstage fixture, says Jean Kroeper, who for 21 years has stood in the wings and taken awards from winners to be sent away for inscribing (the Tonys are blank when they are handed out).
"They'll latch onto your arm and you just have to calm them down for a second," says Kroeper, shortly after comforting a hyperventilating Anika Noni Rose, who won best featured actress in a musical for "Caroline, or Change."
A particularly loony moment comes just after the cast of "Avenue Q" performs "It Sucks to Be Me," a number from the show.
"It sucks to be me," echoes a smiling Scarlett Johansson, as she waits in the wings to present an award with Ethan Hawke. Then, turning to Hawke: "It sucks to be you."
Meanwhile, Sally the camel — usually a performer in Radio City's Christmas extravaganza — has lumbered from her dressing room and is having an intestinal problem just yards away.
"Watch out for camel dung!" a stagehand bellows, as Jackman prepares to mount the beast and a handler cleans up the floor.
Similar excitement accompanies the moments before the CBS telecast begins. Chorus members from "Wicked" and "Fiddler on the Roof" chatter nervously as they practice dance moves before going onstage for the opening production number.
"Well, I'm going to stretch, too, if everybody else is stretching," jokes second audio technician Sean McClintock, and he props his leg on a rail.
There is relative calm in the green room, where presenter Nicole Kidman perches on a chaise lounge chatting quietly with lyricist Carole Bayer Sager. Anna Paquin peruses a table of food — raspberry cheesecake, skewered beef — with apparent disinterest.
Murmurs of surprise fill the control room when cast members from "Avenue Q" filter into the wings as the nominees are read for best musical, the evening's most coveted prize. There is near-pandemonium when the show is crowned the winner, beating "Wicked," which had been favored to win.
"Can you believe it?" gasps "Q" star John Tartaglia as he stumbles into a waiting area off stage. Presenter Sarah Jessica Parker walks by, and grasps his arm.
"Congratulations!" she says with a smile, and looks back as a crush of well-wishers carries her away. "Go out and enjoy your night, man!"