Actually, our playbills are relatively cheap. We allow 20 pages so that each members of the cast can have a photo and biography, so that we can recognized ALL of our sponsors accordingly. 20 pages is not unheard of, nor all the cost prohibitive. For a 12 performance run in the 561 seat house, our playbills cost comes to $750 dollars by the time we account the $600 discount received from the printers in exchange for advertising space in the program.

No, we are not 'higher up' in the food chain. Our budgets are little larger than some community theatre's, but were STILL a community theatre. There are many community theatres with larger budgets than ours, which is pretty meager. Take for instance, the Indianapolis Civic Theatre (which is probably the closest theatre to us that resembles our goals and management practices), who's budget, according to their 990 form, was $600,000 for 2008.

what set's us apart from most community theatre's is that we are 'professionally managed', and we will also derive a large sum of our income from fundraisers and our education and summer camp programs.


Edited by lparks - 4/01/10 at 5:03pm

Our Playbill size actually went up for our upcoming show of Narnia. Went from 20 pages up to about 32 - in order to take advantage of ad space. I feel that MANY theatre's do not take advantage of selling ads, which has proved to be  a large source of revenue for us so far.

Having recently gone through this discussion about the order of the production staff, I finally gave up, and gave our playbill people  this rule of thumb -those who put the most brain power into the show get the higher billing!