“At its most fundamental, it’s creating a space for artists and creatives to do great work”
As the Edinburgh Festival Fringe draws closer, more theatremakers are asking themselves an important question – how do I bring my show to the stage? Fear not – there is now a toolkit to help guide you. Make The Damn Show, created by writer and producer Brian Rosenthal, provides both practical tools and advice for bringing shows to life. To quote the toolkit’s website, “The goal isn’t to tell you what show to make. The goal is to help you actually make the one you’re already trying to make.”
Recently, I had the chance to speak with Rosenthal about Make The Damn Show. We discussed how his own experiences in theatres inspired him to create the toolkit, what people can expect from it, and even some general advice on becoming a producer!
How did you first get started in the world of theatre?
So my earliest memories are in New Jersey, going to this regional outdoor theatre called Plays in the Park that would put on musicals in the summer – everyone would bring their blankets and sit on a hill. It was like really high-level regional theatre, and my mom volunteered there. From a very young age, I remember seeing shows and being like, “This is what I want to do.” So, between the ages of seven or eight, and going off to college to get my BFA in acting, I must have done like 25 shows! I was just really bitten by the bug. I was like, “I want to be on stage.” It was how I socialized, it was how I had fun. I’m sure there’s some sort of psychological assessment of that, too – why I want to spend so much of my time stepping into other characters. But I did everything! I started in the ensembles of shows with children, like Oliver!, and just evolved and did all my high school productions and did some semi-professional dinner theatre in Central Pennsylvania, outside of Harrisburg. Whether it was at the Jewish Community Center or the Youth for Christ Center, I was like, “Wherever there’s a play happening within a ten-mile radius of where I live, I am there.” So I saw my first shows, went, “This is it,” and that took up a good amount of my childhood!
And then what made you want to get into producing from there?
So in the beginning, it was out of necessity. My main preference was to be performing and writing. Post-college, my peers and future collaborators, we all landed in either Chicago, New York, or LA, and, like many young creatives, realized the world was not waiting for us to be like, “Hey, we’re here!” So we just started making our own stuff that we wanted to see. And with the success of StarKid, we had this idea that it was possible. That was a real gift to know that if you make something and it is decent, people will show up – you don’t have to wait around for someone to greenlight you. And then cut to fifteen years later, I just developed an affinity for producing. While a lot of it is just paperwork and hours in spreadsheets on your computer and talking to people, at its most fundamental, it’s creating a space for artists and creatives to do great work. To me, that’s such an important part of the process, and one that I’ve grown to love as much as writing or acting. That’s why, in the last couple of years, I have explored not just producing my own work, but also producing other people’s work as well.
And now the key question what exactly does a producer do?
What doesn’t a producer do? As the size of a production scales up and there are more people in individual positions, it changes slightly. At the Broadway level, you can be a lead producer who is the fulcrum for the project, bringing together the money and the creatives, just making the whole machine move. And even then, there’s a distinction between the producer and the general manager. But as you scale down to indie theatre, where I’ve spent a lot of my career producing shows, from free sketch shows up to a $250,000 musical, everyone’s wearing too many hats. The producer is doing everything from putting together the budget schedules, speaking with Equity, advising the creatives on how to make things work within the resources that you have . . . Just making it all work! Sometimes a producer is stepping in as a stage manager. Sometimes, on really small productions, you’re in the lobby selling merch, you’re actually running the board . . . So it really varies, but pretty much anything you haven’t hired someone else to do, you’re doing it as the producer.
And what made you want to create Make The Damn Show?
After we got back from doing tour dates in Australia last year with Gross Prophets with Tin Can Bros, I was just thinking personally what I wanted my next creative project to be. Maybe writing about the logistics of producing doesn’t seem to sound like a creative project, but to me, I really wanted to take stock of what I’ve learned over the last fifteen years. As I started doing my own personal writing, I realized that while every production is different, I have learned some things over the last fifteen years! When I was first starting out, I had no idea what I was doing, because there were not as many courses about how to actually produce your own work, or what a producer does. If there were, it was dusty old textbooks about how to work in a theatre that were not akin to what it actually means to produce in a black box.
So I started putting together these guides, then it evolved into a toolkit, and now it’s evolved into an interactive roadmap that you can interact with. You can just use templates if you’re further along in your education, or you can start from the beginning and learn about my philosophy that I’ve developed as a producer over the years. While everyone’s producing style is different, I hope it can inspire people to form their own way of working. And also, I just don’t want people to make as many mistakes as I made starting out. Hopefully, you can get the basics down. Here’s how it works from a logistics level, from a philosophical level. Here are some things I’ve learned over the last fifteen years – maybe this will make your journey a little easier. Here are some exercises to work out your show against, to decide for yourself whether it’s even worth putting the time and effort into making this show right now.
What can people expect if they take part in Make The Damn Show?
It’s a self-paced toolkit. It’s modular in that if you already have creative collaborators, you can skip where I talk about how to work with creative collaborators. If you already have a venue or an idea of how you want to mount the show, you can skip that and move right on to how to form contracts and agreements with collaborators. Or, you could do it from A to Z. Here’s a roadmap where you can literally check off the different steps as you go, and you can take these little detours to learn about those individual aspects of producing as much as you want. And then it also includes a workspace for your own show materials as they come along. I want people to be actively producing their own show while they’re working through the toolkit.
Like a working case study!
Yeah, and it’s still evolving! I put it out in the world early this year, and the reaction I’ve been getting from people who have been using it has been helping me form how it evolves. There’s a budget template that I use from my own productions that I included in the original toolkit, and I had a conversation with a creator out of Australia, and he was like, “Do you have templates for how we might split royalties on the back end if we’re not paying collaborators upfront?” So I put that together. Even though the front end is a dashboard for each user, the back end is based in Google Drive, so I could drop updates in people’s folders. So I just did the upgrade, and now I’m using it for one of the productions I’m working on now! That was inspired by that feedback.
What has it been like helping people produce their shows with Make The Damn Show?
It’s interesting! I’m a big fan of a beginner’s mind when it comes to how I approach a lot of pursuits in my life. I start a show, and there’s a foundation there, but I go, “This show is completely unique, and the way it’s going to come together is going to be completely unique.” It’s helped me realize how much I do know, even though it is such a unique experience to put together a play or a musical, and to impart that knowledge has been super rewarding. I would have liked something like this when I was first starting out and didn’t realise what I was doing, so to be able to discover who I am as an educator in this space, and to be working with up-and-coming creators or new producers has been really cool!
Have you found that producing differs internationally?
I think, fundamentally, it’s the same. In the toolkit, I specify when I’m talking about really cool things like insurance, and that I’m talking about the American system, or that things are done in US dollars. But, fundamentally, 90% of it is the same. And over the last few years, having produced in the UK, Australia, and at Fringe festivals, I would say the major difference as an American producer is figuring out the logistical differences in things like visas and insurance, which has been quite a learning curve. But what they do for the production, or whether you need insurance for a production, basically remains the same. It might differ slightly, but basically it’s all the same.
What would you say is the ultimate goal of Make the Damn Show?
I think it’s just to inspire people to make the damn show! Right now on the website, the hero log line says, “Making theatre is hard. This makes it suck less,” and that’s the truth of it. You can’t get around the hard work. I don’t want to gussy up that, “Oh, producing is easy!” I feel like a lot of the online creator space is like, “Zero to 1,000 followers in five minutes!” It’s just bullshit. If you’re doing this, this is going to be a lot of hard work. Hopefully, I can make your life a little easier by imparting some of these lessons that I’ve learned. And also, there are contributors as well who share stories from their experience in independent theatre. So if I can inspire one frustrated person not being able to get their work produced, whether they’re an actor, writer, or producer, and they just say, “To hell with it, I’m gonna do it myself,” then that is success for me. All of my professional success has come from just doing it myself, grinding and putting in that hard work, and then that will unlock something that gets me to the next stage of my career.
And other than all the toolkits and things within the programme, what advice do you have for those interested in becoming producers?
I’m also beginning to post free resources on the site as well, and experimenting with that. Whether it’s guides on your first Fringe Festival, or just basics, like “What does it mean to make a show with no money? Is it actually possible?” I’m trying to answer some of those questions that people might be Googling at midnight if they’re semi-curious about producing their own show. But there are just so many little lessons I’ve learned over the years. Momentum in producing is more important than getting it right, because there are so many aspects that feel intimidating, like working with theatre companies or putting together a budget, but it’s all malleable and moving. At the end of the day, if you make a mistake, you just learn from it, and you move on. That’s gotten me everywhere in my professional and creative life. Don’t dwell, learn from it and move on. One of the major lessons I’ve learned about producing has been understanding that time, bandwidth, and relationships are as important a resource as money. That can be really significant when you’re putting together a show, especially on a shoestring budget.
For more information on Make The Damn Show, click here.
Leave a comment