Hi there,

I'm about a season into a new community theater. We have several challenges (being an English Language theater in a non-English speaking country...which I'll post about in another thread), but one that I keep turning over in my head is the question of "Repertory" or "project by project" production.

In my market (Prague, Czech Republic but the system is also used in Germany), theaters produce plays in true rep, meaning that at any one time they will have about 10 shows in rep and play a different show every day, each show playing a few times per month. While I can see the benefits of this from an audience point of view - there is more of a chance for you to get full houses as new audience members can see a lot more shows in a shorter period of time, shows can have time to build word of mouth between performances - my american experience rebels against that kind of setup.

I tend to feel like that kind of setup is good when you have actors on a monthly salary and engage them for an entire season, so they're playing every day in different things. On the other hand, I feel like there is a benefit to having a cast play the same show multiple times in a row to get it into their skin. I haven't worked in the rep system here but it seems like the actors would lose a lot of energy getting back up to speed on shows they haven't done in a week or two.

Our approach so far is to play one production at a time (4 or 5 performances), then moving on to the next production. I do feel the pull, however: questions about people who missed the run wanting to see the show...etc. Our actors, however, being mostly expats, aren't going to commit to an entire season of shows. If we COULD run in rep, it would certainly fit better with the way theaters here are set up (renting space in a theater, because the theater itself is running in rep, becomes an exercise in booking a tuesday here, then friday, then a sunday to monday...forget about booking two thursday to sunday runs in a row! and you have to tech before each performance because something else will have played in the space in between shows...)

I don't know. I feel like I'm rambling here, but I wanted to get your impressions of the benefits of running shows in rep versus running one show at a time.

As I said, I'll post later about the challenges of running a small English language theater in the middle of a much much larger Czech speaking market. Not that there aren't exciting opportunities as well...

Thanks,

Brian

I agree with Topper. I don't see how you could find unpaid volunteers to commit on a long term basis to a show. Maybe it's different in other areas, I'm just going on my little corner of the world.

Originally posted by briancaspe I don't think that we'd be running something every day, but rather, to fit in with the system, playing one play over several months, but only a few shows per month.

Well, if that's how you have to do it and you have people that are willing I guess that's the way to go. As an actor you'd have to really keep on top of the script on the days off--at least that's what I'd have to do. Do you have much of a set that you move in and out in one day? Another concern I'd have is getting the audience to show up on the right day, but maybe they're used to a different approach there?