#theatretea

Should we have continued with the original opening night instead of holding for one more day? I sure don’t think so, but we did it anyway. Was the cast ready and fully recovered by opening night? Well, they weren’t contagious, but two of them still felt like death warmed over when curtain rose and went home immediately after it fell. Was the show really ready and polished by opening night?

No. No, it was not. The performance itself was strong enough to still be fun and engaging and it was still overall high-quality, but it was definitely not final product-quality.

It did not help that the stage manager fell ill two days before as the cast were recovering, so the final preview and opening weekend required the technical manager to learn and run the lights and sound cues in about 12 hours. He was also in the throes of reconfiguring the microphones and speakers feeding into the board, so the quality of the sound was wildly inconsistent. Since all the previews were cancelled on account of the cast falling ill, I had to reschedule all photography to fall on opening night rather than gathering it and some professional videography in advance and for promotional material and trailer generation to be ready come opening night. The photographer and cast were forced to have their individual character photos taken in the set under work lights during the mic check, and the technical manager was desperately trying to spin all the plates for final completion at the same time. It was a total clusterfuck. The photographer was frustrated that nothing was ready, the lights could not be adjusted (we had neither the time nor the manpower) and everyone was talking over one another, but she calmed down some once I explained, in no uncertain terms, that not even the set was completely ready the day prior, and the performers definitely were not, either.

The mics were nothing short of terrible on opening night, and I was grateful for my decision to have postponed the videography until the next week. As it turned out, when the technical manager reviewed the still-camera footage of the show that the theatre takes for archival purposes, the sound hadn’t even recorded at all because the board was not set up correctly. Since the videographer would have been plugging into the board for sound, this would have been a huge problem.

While the cast’s illness was not a secret, we did not advertise this to patrons mostly because management didn’t want the public perception of the theatre to be a hotbed of sickness. COVID-19 is still a bogeyman in theatre as much as hospitality and service, so it was interesting to hear the conflicting viewpoints of, “we should explain the cast got sick so they don’t think it was an issue on the theatre’s end” and “nobody will come if they think they’ll all get sick!” enter the discussion at the same time.

However, the big picture is never easy to communicate to the public: the musical cast was comprised entirely of outside actors, not the theatre’s stable ensemble or admin staff, and their rehearsals were isolated to the upper floor main stage of the theatre after hours and away from the main floor nightly shows. The only person interacting with them on a regular basis were the technical manager and production manager, and nobody had seen them for two weeks because they had been holed upstairs working on the set when it wasn’t being rehearsed upon. The risk of their show-specific sickness breaching containment didn’t exist. Actually, I was the only other staff member at risk because I’d be in the back of several rehearsals filming phone video to use for social media in lieu of any other proof of concept - but I stopped once tech week began and half the cast was in costume while the rest waited for theirs to be finished.

(“Ugh. That video is so unpolished, and it’s just a rehearsal! You don’t even have clean audio from the board. I can’t believe you showed that to the world,” an outside contractor told me during a consulting meeting. “You’ve got to get better video and audio equipment.”

“Well,” I said, “the director was fine with it, and video I can capture, edit, and turn around quickly without using a lot of RAM on my work laptop is better than nothing at all. I’m not a film crew, and I’m not using the marketing budget for that at this stage of the production.”

After the debacle with the professional preview videography having to cancel due to the cast’s sickness, my boss began to see it my way. The backup videography team I contacted in the event opening night video was mandatory also gave us a quote of $2,500+, and that was with a nonprofit discount. Yeah, no.)

One of the worst things marketing can do is get messaging out to the public only to have to turn around and contradict it—especially in a short period of time—so I quietly ignored any instruction to maintain continued blatant advertising of opening night on the promised week until the final call on the show’s status became clear. (My bosses didn’t notice; they don’t exactly look closely at the shit I post on social media or take the time to understand why my marketing plans are set up the way they are. I don’t blame them, either. It’s too much information and they had bigger fish to fry.)

It didn’t matter. The musical’s opening weekend was packed, and because the show was highly conventional, the city’s equivalent of the Tony’s took notice and started sending judges to see the show and evaluate it. This is great for PR, but it also means that a theatre must give away a lot of free tickets to accommodate the slush judges. Like, more than it bargained for. It’s common for theaters to give out free tickets to promote a show, but this went above and beyond.

But what was anyone gonna say? No?! No to free acclaim and critical review?!

“Critical review”, I say. The local Tony judges for round one of qualification are really just every Tom, Dick, and Harry off the street attending on behalf of the organization and willing to report whether they liked the show or not. Usually, the panel is full of, um, older people, and my employer’s shows are not often, well…

They’re usually R-rated and highly alternative. These are polarizing things to be, and so the local Tony’s usually hate my employer, and my employer resents them. This show, which was kind of like a musical, bayou-y-er, only slightly edgier version of Clue, was the exception.

In truth, the musical is cute. That’s the word: cute. It’s not groundbreaking and it’s not deep, but it is charmingly cute and happy to be exactly what it is. The songs are catchy, which is good, especially considering its creators are a viral tiktok musical artist known for songs about dogs—whom I will call Gumbo—and one of the theatre’s most prolific creator-improvisers—whom I will call Cheddar—and the premise relies on just about every murder mystery trope there is.

(When it was time to begin promoting the show—after both Cheddar and Gumbo had ghosted me when they said they’d supply me with promotional assets like demo tracks or brainstorming sessions for the previous six months—Gumbo came to me to discuss what he’d brainstormed doing for social media in service of promoting his show, and how he thought he could use his existing platform to best support that. The usual strategy meeting shit.

“Well,” I said, losing my patience once he finished, “if you wanna do it so bad, where’s the content?! I’ve already started promoting it!”

I’d actually go out of my way pretty significantly for Gumbo, mind you. Gumbo is a genius of hard work more than anything else, and he runs himself ragged on his projects. They’re polished, sometimes to the point of their own sanitized detriment—comes with the territory of tiktokkin’ it. Cheddar, meanwhile, is a dyed-in-the-wool impulsive procrastinator. Their creative processes could not be more different.)

Anyway, the people showed up. And no sooner had I gotten the collateral to propel the rest of the run together did my bosses make the executive decision to extend the run. Which meant I had to redo it all. And meant I had to redo the collateral for the upcoming shows, because their runs had just been reduced by one week.

“If you authorize me to start advertising a show using outside ad placements—paid placements; printed placements—only to radically change the dates like that again,” I told one of my bosses, “I think I might just kill you.”

Not only does my employer have a reputation for being 20 pounds of chaos in a five-pound bag, but I signed an NDA when I was hired and nothing I have to say is a trade secret. In fact, I spend most of my time communicating bits of it to the public in more flattering language. I’m only cagey with some of these details because, while one could figure out my real-life identity from what I’ve already said, I don’t want it explicitly spelled out in the front of a Tumblr post, of all places. My personal information is promiscuous, but it’s not a free-use exhibitionist whore, for god’s sake.

I work for a nonprofit comedy theatre that does pretty much everything, but has a specialization and reputation for improv comedy. On paper, I am the full-time marketing staff with support in the form of a part-time communications manager and an occasional hired third-party contractor. Every day is a new “emergency” that never truly qualifies for or reaches the level of crisis management, but it sure gets treated like it does.

My absolute favorite story of this nature being: before I was hired, a director wanted to do a Guns N’ Roses-themed improv one-off—advertised and everything. It wasn’t selling well in advance, but more importantly, the cast thought it was stupid. They overpowered the director and decided they’d do an *NSYNC show instead about three days before curtain. I’m told it “sold better”, but considering the timeline and the audience’s tendency to procrastinate in buying tickets for this particular type of show, who’s to say?

Whenever I get to overwhelmed by a last-minute change in programming and how much messaging must change, I recall the moment the youngest member of the cast self-assuredly recounted to me, “We’re DOING *NSYNC!” and then I remember that nothing I’m doing is actually that important. We’re just doing *NSYNC and praying that people like it—specifically people within ticket-buying distance of the theatre. Each show may be treated like a digital project for the purposes of marketing, but it sure isn’t in reality.

What this means is that the greatest consequence for any errors I put out regarding showtimes, misspellings, or confusing information is a bunch of people on the social media channels correct me in the comments—which is increased engagement, might I add—or talk amongst themselves about how, “The marketing for this place is really bad. What do they even do all day? How could they miss that?”—which means that people are paying attention to what’s goin’ out in the first place. While a show can fail, my efforts can’t fail as long as I keep making them since, to a certain extent, it’s true what they say: any press is good press.

But the bane of my existence is the theatre’s social media, which unfortunately takes up most of my time. As a person, I just plain-vanilla hate it, which is why I have a Tumblr—the social media platform for people who hate social media—and as a professional, I know many of the most common influencer strategies are not sustainable if social media is not one’s whole-ass entire job. And even then, it’s not always sustainable depending on what one is doing.

My feelings are not a secret.

“Everyone, I know it makes you miserable, but as your marketing person, it is my job to remind you—this is 2025. You can’t do anything anymore without proving it on social media. LinkedIn is a progress report. Whenever you have a production meeting, a lunch meeting with other theatre professionals, or even attend shows here or at other local theatres, I need you to take a picture. You can post it on your own profiles and tag the theatre, or you can send it to me and I will post it directly to the company page. But you have to do it,” I said last week to a room of thoroughly whelmed individuals. “Remember: you know you’re doing it right if it makes you miserable and like you just gave away a piece of your soul and sacrificed time that you will never get back.”

Or, more to the point: “Remember—we’re driving sales. A good rule of thumb is that the thing you don’t want to give up or show to others is the only thing of any value, so that’s exactly the kind of thing I’m going to come ask you for.”

However, my attitude is not shared by the younger members of the talent pool. This is a mixed blessing. Sometimes, they’ll volunteer to help me make silly, nothingburger videos to feed the content machine between meaningful announcements. That is, they say they will ‘til I hit ‘em with the ol’ ground rules.

“Whatever you do must relate directly to the theatre or the current show taking place there with which you are involved,” I say. “I don’t share self-promotion or individual ensemble members’ projects that don’t relate to the theatre. If I promoted one performer’s project and not another ‘cause I just didn’t know about it, they would probably rip me apart, and then try to do the same to each other.”

Any support I’m offered dries up real fast after that. But I know this is probably the right call because, once, I saw the dawning of understanding bloom on one of the older performers’ faces.

“Oh. You’re right. Because we’re the worst kind of people,” he said.

“Nah,” I said. “You’re just actors.”

“Yeah. Like I said: the worst kind of people,” he repeated—as serious as a heart attack.

Sometimes, it seems, I have no choice but to reward masturbation because there’s nowhere to hide.

There’s a new scripted show coming up. It’s an “immersive experience”. It’s a “cocktail hour”. It’s a “burlesque show”. It has an FAQ that makes the web page three times as long as it should be. It is a massive financial risk, it is logistically challenging, it bullies out other shows because it requires the use of the entire theatre for its whole run, and frankly, it is a pain in my ass.

However, it’s laughable for me, of all people, to complain about it—it is far and away more challenging for the director, those creating the set, and especially those operating the front of house. When the front of house folks read the list of ingredients necessary for the included cocktails, I watched their faces change color as they scrolled—scrolled!—through the ingredients list for the first drink. They’ll need to make three unique ones for each of the folks in the 200+ seat theatre in the teeny weeny lobby bar.

“Dude. It’s an issue that we have to scroll just to read the ingredients for one drink,” said *NSYNC. “And this is mid-shelf stuff. Never mind stocking all these different things; this ain’t in the budget.”

The drink anecdote is a reasonable reflection of every facet of the production, but I’ll provide another one that’s not so much expensive as it is mystifying: the show has its own social media account to support the immersive experience, and to tell you the truth as the marketing person, I’m not even sure the best way to leverage the damn thing given the parameters placed on it. This is not good, as I was the only one posting on it until recently.

If the show manages to pull itself out of the hat, it’ll be something neat and novel. But for now, I don’t know what to say about it except it has given me a new distaste for immersive experiences that I did not know I had before.

For example, the most common apps and promotional platforms for experiential events basically just aim to control your ticket sales and become the ticketing platform—with a project management and promotional team attached. That’s great for an independent show that wants to travel and doesn’t have an established operation, but it makes absolutely no sense at all for an established operation. Netflix cannibalized television and movies, but I guess it’s enlightening to know that the model of a subscription-based whatever (in this case, marketing and sales) effectively trying to take the rights of one’s production can extend to experimental live shows and events. I realize that what I just wrote can describe any CRM or monthly subscription-based service, but it just stings all the more to see it in action.