Nikon D50 camera settings for low light & no flash situation

ill be taking pictures for my girlfriend for the musical she is helping out with this weekend. the show is Chicago.

it is perfectly acceptable for people in the audience to use a flash camera at the shows, but if i were to sit there and snap 250 pictures during the show or somehtings i dont think the cast would be too happy.

what settings should i set my camera on in order to take some quality pictures of the show??? i have a nikon d50, 18-55mm nikkor lense

the main problems i see is that there is a lot of movement on stage, i can only get so close, i will be sitting in the dark, the stage will be bright as all heck, and i forgot my tripod (although i can find one on campus to 'borrow' for the evening)

man i have so much more to learn about this camera it is sickening

TIA
-chris

Stage lighting is rarely as bright as you think it is... Being in a dark room can really fool you. Assuming you lens is f/3.5 - f/5.6 you still may have a little trouble with available light... So first off you want to experiment with you ISO sensitivity to help keep your shutter speed fast. You can use a good niose reduction tool like noiseware to clean up images taken at even ISO1600.

If Nikon settings are anything like Canon you should be able to set your camera to M, A, S or P and this will disable the flash from automatically coming up as long as it is still in the closed position. I would personally use M so I could force my aperture to it's widest and a fast shutter speed.

The key is that in order to avoid blurry images... you don't want to dip below 1/100th of a second at 55mm unless you have really steady hands or a use that tripod and even with the tripod at slow speeds you can still end up with motion blur.

See the "canon SLR" thread below this concerning the very inexpensice 50mm f/1.8 lens. Without it you will have to do as Sarahsboy mentions above and shoot very high ISO. You can disable your flash on the D50 (assuming it works like the D70) by pressing your flash button and turning the rear dial until the flash indicator has a circle and line through it. If you do not do that, it will try to use the pop up flash.