Signage and decor are a beast. Ask anyone who's built a festival site. It's like getting ready for a great big house party. You want every flower in just the right place, even on the side table in the bedrooms nobody's supposed to wander into. And no matter how many scheduling..
Read MoreA line cook in a busy restaurant runs something like three hundred services a year. Three hundred times, the tickets come in, the pressure builds, something goes wrong, and they find out within minutes whether their fix worked. By the end of year one, they've had more reps than most festival producers get in a decade. Because here's the thing nobody tells you when you start in…
Read MoreThe spreadsheet is open and you already know which line has to go.
Maybe it is a stage. Maybe it is a day. Maybe it is the programming strand that never quite paid for itself but that three people on your team would walk through fire for. The math is not ambiguous. You have run it four times hoping it would come out differently. The industry has a clean…
Read MoreYou are eleven weeks out and you are three people short. The site coordinator who ran your load-in the last four seasons took a job with benefits in March. Your best stage manager is booked through November on a tour that pays better than you can. And the production assistant you spent all of last season training just texted to say she is not coming back, and she was lovely about it, which somehow makes it…
Read MoreOne fall afternoon, in a meeting that should have been routine, I watched a newer director go quiet. I knew the look. They had an idea. A good one, probably. The kind that turns a flat revving engine into something that purrs and pours. And across the table sat people who had been around the production bends. People who had tackled a host of challenges before this director ever walked into the building. Those stripes are…
Read MoreIt's August. If you are a spring producer, the show has been struck for months and you know exactly what this stretch of the calendar feels like, even if nobody has ever handed you a word for it. I call it load-out syndrome. Still lit, nothing running. The power is on, the lights are up, and there is no show. You are technically working. You are answering things. But the engine that ran you from January through the gates is idling, and some part of you has not fully…
Read MoreAt the end of June, I knew I needed to disappear. Not forever. Just long enough to hear myself think again. But I couldn't go yet. And if you produce anything for a living, you already know why…
Read MoreIt is the second week of January. The planner is new. The pen still works. You write down the year you want -- rest more, train someone to share the load, finally take the trip -- and for about nine days, you believe yourself. Then the first artist hold lands. The first budget reopens. The advance starts breathing down your neck. And by the time you…
Read More
