People don't trust producers: we can either complain about it or we can try and fix it

It’s long-established by now that the entertainment media likes to give producers a kicking. I see this more in the UK than I do across the pond (although maybe that’s my bias showing; how I learned about this the hard way is a story for another day). Whatever the reason, we often find ourselves the target of opprobrium.

Two recent examples spring to mind. The first is the lawsuits against the production of Cabaret on Broadway, in which an investor’s concerns boil down to feeling misled by the theatre investment model. The second is Equity’s balloting for a series of strikes in the West End after not achieving some of their aims in contract negotiations, for which The Stage’s deeply flawed annual ticketing survey is now being misappropriated as a bargaining chip. The complainant’s arguments have had a lot more airtime in both cases, with lengthy statements about the failings of producers. No doubt this is partly because the media outlets have chosen to centre those voices, but I can’t help but feel that the producer-side of the arguments (ATG and SOLT, respectively) have actively allowed that to happen by providing very muted statements in response.

There is a piece of received wisdom in producing circles that it’s best to keep quiet when the headlines start appearing - that, frankly, commenting too much isn’t going to get you anywhere, and if you can starve the media of the ‘fight’, they’ll move on. It largely works (I’m not going to betray my colleagues by naming examples!).

Whatever the motivation, it leaves a vacuum - publications can pretty freely and frequently sling mud at managers and executives without much fear of being proven wrong. Producers would rather let it go than get caught in a spiralling argument. And on face value you can see why an uninformed reader might feel these two complaints have merit - after all, the investment model is esoteric and opaque, and performer pay is much lower in the West End than in other parts of the acting industry like screen work or commercials. With little rebuttal, those arguments lead the story, and they themselves become the received wisdom to the rest of the industry, who take that reporting on face value (and you can’t blame them for that).

I think both these cases though are symptomatic of a wider issue: people don’t trust producers. The default assumption is to assume producers are the very same cash-grabbing types that Mel Brooks sent up in The Producers. And perhaps we’ve given them cause not to trust us by being quite so shut up in our ivory towers and not engaging in public debate. It’s easier to step back and allow Equity spokespeople to have the limelight than it is to face a hostile crowd of workers who have overwhelmingly voted in favour of strike action because they’re sick and tired.

I’m not going to get caught up in the whys and wherefores of either case. Frankly, I’m not qualified to - I don’t primarily work in the West End or Broadway, I don’t have anything at all to do with Cabaret beyond being an avid listener of Jessie Buckley’s version of “Mein Herr” (no but really, it’s very good), and I’m not part of the contract negotiations. I am simply not inside these particular rooms, and even if I was, it’s not for me to try and speak on those organisations’ behalf. Predictably, my take is that I think the issues at play are nuanced and complicated with good points on each side (although I do think the actions taken by the complainants in both circumstances are an overstep that have come too soon in their individual disputes).

What engages me here instead, is what we do with this information. How can we build more trust? What can producers and general managers be doing day to day, hour by hour, throughout our working lives, that might make workers and investors more willing to take us at our word when we say something they don’t like?

Here follows a series of ideas, from someone who has absolutely failed to build trust in the past and is trying to do it better now.

Everyone is tired of hearing about the price of timber or the rising costs of employing people. Unfortunately, however, those things are true. It’s no good just saying it over and over again, though. The words have stopped meaning anything on their own and if we’re going to convince people of the problems of making the budget make sense, we need to show them the numbers. That doesn’t mean sharing individual salaries, but it does mean being open about the costs of production and explaining what the trade-off for adding an extra four swings would be, or giving concrete reasons why that extra set piece isn’t affordable.

I actually think in an ideal situation the producer might involve some of the creative team and stage management more closely in the budgeting process, rather than taking information from them and going away to write a budget off the back of it - although I can’t say this is something I’ve properly done before beyond the usual discussions. Taking input from the creatives doesn’t mean you have to follow their instructions, although I think it would invite a more collaborative approach to using resources well.

But even if you don’t involve them in budgeting, there’s little to no reason not to share the figures. The very existence of royalties means sales figures and running costs are things they’re going to find out about one way or another. Do you really trust that they never talk about these things with their other colleagues? Or are we simply avoiding difficult conversations because they’re difficult?

Let’s put it another way: on any particular show, why does a private individual living 3500 miles away in New York, who had multiple calls with the producer and considered investing but eventually turned down the opportunity, know more about the show’s finances than its director?

Why do I know exactly what the general manager was paid on [insert any show I received an investment pack for in the last 10 years here], but the actors in that show never knew? What trust does that build?

One of my many hats is working with an investor to help find them shows they might like to invest in - I’m basically the contact point for them, handling admin, helping interpret the numbers and information, and managing communications. A show we placed a small investment in recently reported back, post-closing, that it went approximately 8.5% over budget in pre-production (a total overspend that was a little shy of £100k). The good news is that the show has made significant profit, so that overspend is, when all’s said and done, pretty minor; either way we’ve “won” and this sort of thing is the very reason that productions generally raise more money than they’re likely to need. However, the producers have presumably known about it for a number of weeks and chosen to wait to share it until they can do so with a positive message accompanying it.

The producers did absolutely nothing wrong here - the ability to overspend is well within their rights, and they don’t actually have to tell anyone about it until they report the final production budget months after press night. In fact, telling investors about it now is in many ways to do so early by usual standards, and they’ve done it long before the final profit is confirmed. One might even argue they’ve gone above and beyond.

In this case it’s all worked out. But what if something bigger had gone wrong halfway through the run and the email had been “we’ve had to cancel the rest of the run and unfortunately we overspent the production budget so now there’s no money left to return”? That very rarely actually happens, but it’s not unheard of, and that’s the moment that trust falls apart.

And let’s be clear, I’m writing this from a glass house. I’ve lost an investor in the past by not being ahead of the bad news. Every producer has done it. But we can build more trust by not.

Sometimes it isn’t that you’re hiding bad news, or timing it to arrive when there’s good news to go with it. Sometimes it’s just that you don’t have much news to share. But there’s still updates to give - even if they’re mundane.

Few people invest in theatre as a way to make lots of money. Unless you’re part of the inner circle that can negotiate the best deals on the best shows (which usually requires working your way up through the ranks by investing in the not-so-sure-fire-hits first, or by having huge spending power), you’re probably investing in theatre because you love theatre, and you’d rather put your money there than into the stock market, which is impersonal and often boring.

We keep those people on board by making them feel involved. It’s easy for us on the inside to forget that the job we do is actually quite interesting to the people not in the industry - things that might feel a little mundane like the meet and greet on the first day of rehearsals or the white card presentation are fascinating to people outside the industry. Share them. Update the investors. Bring them into the process.

And when there is concrete news to share, share it. I don’t want to find out that we got absolutely mauled by the Times by finding the review myself a week later. Tell me up front.

If an investor doesn’t want to trawl through the update, they won’t read it. But if an investor does want an update and they have to ask for it, you’re already in a place where trust is slipping.

It’s unavoidable: on occasion, the company are unhappy. They need to express their unhappiness to someone. That person is often the resident director or the company manager or their friends in the cast. Sometimes it’s about the state of the dressing rooms, sometimes it’s about the hours they’re putting in, sometimes it’s just that the air conditioning is too cold. Whatever it is, they should be able and willing to tell the producer or the GM.

I’ve lost count of the amount of times that someone has told me of something bad that happened in a rehearsal or during a run long after it took place, because I wasn’t there when it happened and it got forgotten. If you’re not turning up regularly, you’re not a trusted face, and if you’re not a trusted face, you’re not approachable. Add it up over time, and you have a company who don’t share their concerns but are unhappy at work and that’s when the mutinies start. Everyone in London theatre has heard the stories of the West End shows where the cast and the producers were or are at war.

So turn up, be visible, make sure you talk to everyone. A company manager exists to field a lot of these things, but they’re not a replacement for the producer or GM.

This one is a personal challenge for me - I find it easy to fade into the background in rehearsals and let everyone else get on with it, but if you do that then nobody is going to want to speak to you when they’re having a hard time.

Every production has a ‘why’. Why are you putting it on now, in this theatre, in this way? What’s the purpose? Sometimes it’s development. Sometimes it’s profit. Sometimes it’s because you’re passionate about the story even though you know it won’t make any money.

Does everyone else know that, or are you just assuming that they think you love it? Do they know what the objective of the workshop or the try-out is, or are you just assuming that they’ve figured it out? How can you expect them to achieve those aims if they don’t know what they are?

The same goes for difficult decisions. If you’ve had to choose to not have very many understudies, does everyone understand what the trade-off was, or do they just think you didn’t want to pay for them? Is it that having fewer understudies means you can have the revolve, and that has elevated the production enough to take the risk? Are they on board with having to work a bit harder to make it work with fewer understudies, or are they just assuming you’re squeezing the production for profit? If you’re not willing to explain yourself, is it because deep down you worry that your reasoning was flawed?

Truthfully, very few shows are squeezing the production for profit because that isn’t how theatre economics work. But if we don’t explain ourselves - if we limit ourselves to short statements delivered impersonally (or read out by someone else over a tannoy… if you know, you know) - then how is anyone supposed to know?

And then once you’ve explained yourself, make sure you deliver on what you explained. If you’re asking your team to cut back on costume budget so that we can have really good wigs - make sure the wigs are really good.

Investors, actors, stage managers, production electricians. They’re all talking about the decisions on the show. All the time. And they’re all talking about how they would do it differently. Don’t believe me? Think back to when you were a production assistant and everyone was having those conversations with you about the stupid decisions your boss made. And think about how now they’re not having them with you anymore because you’re the boss.

Often these ideas wouldn’t work for one reason or another - usually because they don’t have the producer’s overall sight of the budget and creative vision and ideas. But sometimes these ideas simply are better than the ones we’re executing.

Are you asking for their feedback? Are you listening to it? Are you willing to pivot?

In the corporate world, investors often find their way onto boards. This is usually the biggest, most influential shareholders, who’ve negotiated a position based on the size of their share. You bring them in the room to prevent them bringing down the operation if they become unhappy. We do this in theatre: that’s effectively what a co-producer is, although the co-producers’ actual input is usually pretty limited unless they’re a general partner.

In the more progressive side of the corporate world, one of those board members is sometimes a smaller investor who represents the interests of other smaller investors. A voice for the ‘ordinary’ people who have a stake in the company, rather than just the big dogs. They might not always be listened to, but they have a voice that can be heard: then it’s up to the board if they’re going to ignore it (at their peril!).

In the screen world, and increasingly in parts of the West End and Broadway, sometimes executive producers who might consult on the steering of the ship include the leading actors. They may even have a financial stake in the project. They almost certainly have a royalty. Their reputation is on the line, and their face is the selling point for the product, so they get to have input in how it’s shaped. A good company leader will share the thoughts of the people further down the chain. But is the famous actor with the private dressing room or trailer the most approachable person in the company or the film crew? Probably not.

In the world of cooperatives, representatives of the lowest-rung workers are on the board. They fight for the interests of their peers when the management bods get too caught up in the numbers and forget the people. They have a meaningful voice and a meaningful say. They are the best-qualified people to determine whether a decision is going to rock the boat. (They also often have the - convoluted - power to remove the bosses if it’s all gone wrong, but I’m not suggesting we do that).

You can’t hear the voice of the ensemble if the ensemble aren’t in the room. What if we invited them in? Would they trust us more then?