For community theaters, schools, churches and nonprofit organizations
Somebody at a board meeting says we should put on a show. Everybody agrees. Then the room goes quiet, because nobody knows what happens next.
What happens next is not easy, but it is easier than you would think. A play is a project with a hard deadline and about eight jobs. You have run harder things than this.
The producer’s actual job
The producer is the project manager. The producer does not direct, and typically does not act. The producer makes sure the show can happen: the venue, the money, the people, the dates, the rights.
If you are the one who called the meeting, this is probably you. The good news is that the job needs organization. Theater knowledge is optional. If you can run a fundraising dinner for two hundred people, you can produce a play.
Fill these roles before anything else
Eight jobs, and one person can hold two of them. Nobody should hold three.
- Producer. Owns the whole thing. Says yes and no about money, usually within the bounds of the organization or committee.
- Director. Owns what happens on stage.
- Stage manager. Runs rehearsals and calls the show. The most undervalued job in the building.
- Music or sound lead. Owns every noise the audience hears.
- Box office. Tickets, money, will-call, the list at the door.
- House manager. Doors, seating, programs, ushers, the lost child in the lobby.
- Sponsorship lead. Sells the ads and the packages. Usually your best fundraiser.
- Marketing lead. Fills the seats.
Write one page for each: what you do, when, roughly how many hours. Volunteers say yes far more often to a defined job than to “help with the show.”
The order things happen in
Nine months out. Confirm the dates. Book the venue. Get the rights. Name your core team. Nothing else matters until these four are done.
Six months. Start selling sponsorships. This is earlier than feels natural and it is the single biggest predictor of whether you make money.
Four months. Announce auditions. Cast. Start rehearsing. Put tickets on sale.
Two months. Marketing in earnest. Press release out. Program to the printer.
Two weeks. Technical rehearsals. Nothing new gets added after this point, no matter how good the idea is.
What first-timers get wrong
Selling tickets too late. People plan December in October. A show announced three weeks out plays to half a theater no matter how good it is.
Treating sponsorship as an afterthought. Ticket revenue has a ceiling: seats times price times nights. Sponsorship does not. For most fundraising productions, sponsors are the difference between a nice evening and a real result.
Skimping on sound. Covered elsewhere and worth repeating. Bad audio is the only technical failure an audience will not forgive, because it stops them following the story.
Nobody owning the money. One person, full transparency, one spreadsheet, every dollar in and out. A shared sheet works well, with two or three other people given read-only access for oversight. Decide this at the first meeting or you will be reconstructing it in January.
What you can skip
Elaborate sets. Complicated lighting. A live band. Professional anything. None of these is what an audience remembers.
They remember whether they could hear it, whether it was funny, or entertaining, or heartwarming, or all of the above, and whether they knew somebody on stage. The third one is free and it is the most powerful thing a community production has.
One thing to hold onto
Community theater is not professional theater with a smaller budget. It is a different thing that happens to use the same building. Its audience is there partly for the play and largely because their friends, family and neighbors are in it. Cast widely. The people on stage bring the people in the seats.
About this guide
Written by Curtain & Cause. We write original plays for community theaters and work with the nonprofit organizations staging them as fundraisers. Christmas on the Dial is an original full-length play staged as a live 1950s radio broadcast, with the audience as the studio audience.
Questions about any of the above are welcome, whether or not you are looking at this show. booking@curtainandcause.com
License the show · Book it as a fundraiser · Questions and answers
