Do not produce children's theatre if you're not organized

by Chris Peterson, OnStage Blog Founder

Last weekend, my son made his theatrical debut. He performed in a children’s production of Disney’s ‘Descendants.’ While I wish I could say he had fun, there were multiple issues. The most being the inefficiencies and disorganization of the theatre group producing the show. Their failures led to my son telling me he never wants to do theatre again.

The issue was that this was the first time the theatre group had done a full-length children’s show. ‘Descendants’ doesn’t have a Jr version available yet, so the show was produced with children ages 13 to five. While they had done plenty of seasons of adult shows, they had never done a children’s show and were unprepared for the challenges that arose.

An immediate red flag I saw was their rehearsal schedule. Their schedule spanned eight weeks in total. Rehearsals on Tuesdays and Thursdays for two hours each for the first six weeks. Then they added a third rehearsal for week seven before rehearsing five days straight before opening night.

That’s not nearly enough time. Especially not for a cast of which many were appearing in their first production, and some of them couldn’t read the script.

What they should have done is not produce a children’s production during the school year and wait until the summer break. Then, you could angle the production as a camp and work with the students all week for multiple hours a day. By the time we got to opening night, very few knew their lines, songs, blocking, or choreography.

Also, the tech aspects hadn’t been fully prepared. So it took forever to change scenes, pull backdrops and change the cast from costume to costume.

What should have been an hour-long performance resulted in almost three.

My last issue, which goes back to the importance of organization, was that at no point did the theatre group see any of this as a problem. They never apologized to the families that paid $300 for this experience, for their inefficiencies, nor offered any type of resolution.

Over the course of my 30 years of being involved in theatre, I’ve seen incredible children’s productions produced by an array of organization levels. The successful ones have structured plans and responsible staff to execute those plans. I urge any theatre group thinking about doing the same to have actual plans ready before auditions/registration even begins.

Because when there’s not, it can lead to irreparable problems that could result in kids never wanting to do theatre again, and that’s a shame.