It's my experience that many good theatres are run by benchmarking, by looking at "best practices" and then trying to fit things to our own situation, our own needs. If you look at professional theatre of producing a Broadway play and then take what we can and make it our own, use some of the principles for our own needs. In a Broadway show, the producer is the boss. Without getting too grandiose with exagerated examples with multi-million dollar budgets and many producers and associate producers, etc. But, for basic purposes to keep it simple: the producer is the general partner that raises all of the money. The producer gets 50% and is called the general partner of the corporation. All of the investors split the other 50% (depending on their investment) and they become the limited partners. The producer is the boss and starts the process. He or she buys the option of producing the play from the author(s) and the producer hires everyone: director, designers, stage manager, ad agency, negotiates deal with theatre, the producer is the overall boss. Some times the producer fires the director and brings in someone else, but the producer has final say over everything.
Now, go to a school produced play example: the director is the boss and whatever he or she says goes because they run everything and there usually is no producer. The conflict with community theatres is there is no right or wrong example because we live somewhere in between those two situations. Some of us have a producer and for other community theatres, the theatre organization and board and committee, etc are the producer. I think for many organizations, the problem lies in setting the expectation clearly from the beginning of who is responsible for what. We've had some newer directors that are very good at directing and blocking and working with actors, but they are used to more control over everything, that includes marketing, etc. The friction starts when they want more say or more control over areas that traditionally are not under a director domain.
It's an interesting process and we need to constantly re-evaluate and change and have things agreed upon and written down and clearly communicated before the process starts anew. Sometimes that's difficult because many people are overworked and going from one thing to another and are time short.
John
------------- John
cfct@cfu.net
http://www.osterregent.org
http://www.facebook.com/osterregent
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