Copying patches-efficiency

I've had MS for a few years now, but I'm still a little unclear about how this works: when I'm programming a show with 250+ patch changes in each act, It takes quite a while (2-3 minutes) to load each act. Does MainStage re-load every patch for each occurrence? or does it load it once and call upon it when it re-appears in the set? Is there a way to copy/paste the patches as I proso they DO load in this fashion?

MBP 10.11.1