The RENT Wrap Up: We Bloody Did It!
Firstly, I should probably start with an apology for going AWOL from the blog for the last couple of weeks. Turns out that producing a musical and having a “day job” is fairly all-consuming. Who knew?
But, if it makes you feel any better, it’s not just the blog I’ve neglected. The house has been neglected too. And the garden. The garden has basically developed its own ecosystem at this point and I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised if Baloo appeared from behind a bush singing The Bare Necessities.
But RENT is over. The dust is beginning to settle. I’ve reclaimed at least some of my brain capacity.
And… we actually bloody did it.
We produced a musical. People bought tickets. People came. There was a live band. There were lights. There were costumes. There were actual paying members of the public sitting in actual seats watching something that, not all that long ago, existed largely as a slightly ridiculous idea in our heads.
And now it’s over. Which means I’ve finally had a little bit of time to think about what the hell just happened. And, more importantly, what I’ve learned from it.
Because that’s really what this blog was always supposed to be about. Not pretending we know what we’re doing, but sharing what happens while we figure it out.
And believe me, we have figured out a lot.
So… what does a Producer actually do?
This is a question I’ve been asked more than once.
“So you’re not directing?” No. “You’re not Musical Director?” No. “You’re not in it?” No. “You’re not choreographing?” No. (Ha! Can you IMAGINE?) “So… what are you actually doing?”
Excellent question. Turns out: quite a lot.
Producing, I have discovered, is marketing, ticket sales, budgets, spreadsheets, rehearsal venues, schedules, cast communications, production meetings, licensing, programmes, publicity, costumes, props, sourcing things you didn’t know existed, sourcing things you wish didn’t exist, bringing different teams together, making sure everybody knows what’s going on and reassuring everybody that everything is absolutely under control. Including during the moments when you yourself have absolutely no idea what on earth is going on.
It’s recounting the floats for the raffle and programmes every single night. It’s dealing with the urgent panic of a cast member who can’t get into a changing room and therefore can’t access their wig. It’s answering messages, checking things, chasing things, buying things, moving things, finding things and occasionally wondering how something that absolutely definitely existed yesterday has apparently vanished from the face of the earth.
If you sat me down and asked me to account for the hundreds and hundreds of hours I’ve somehow lost to producing RENT, I genuinely don’t think I could. They just… went. Which brings me to one of the biggest things I’d do differently next time.
Ask for help earlier.
I have a terrible habit of not wanting to ask too much of people. Somewhere in my brain, asking somebody to help feels like I’m imposing on them, so my solution is apparently to absorb seventeen additional jobs myself and then wonder why I am stressed out whilst sewing hessian into a wire basket.
What I’ve realised through RENT is that there are brilliant people who genuinely want to be involved. People get enjoyment from helping. They get experience. They learn. They grow. They become part of something.
And, crucially, I don’t have to do everything myself. Who knew?
Actually, that leads me to probably one of my biggest lessons from the whole thing: letting go.
I’m not naturally brilliant at that. But I surrounded myself with people I completely trusted, and somewhere along the way I realised that I didn’t need to be everywhere.
A very special mention here has to go to Lottie Kingsley, who joined us as rehearsal stage manager and became a huge part of supporting stage management and props through show week. I genuinely thought that during the performances I’d be running around backstage, checking things, worrying about things, fixing things and generally being unable to sit still.
Instead, I watched every single minute of every single show.
Every one.
I thought I might get bored watching the same show over and over again. I didn’t.
I thought I might get FOMO and wish I was up there performing. I didn’t.
I just sat there, night after night, completely in awe of what this extraordinary group of people had created and feeling ridiculously proud that Adam and I had somehow brought all of these people together and said, “Shall we do this?”
There were moments I cried every single night. Not because they were cry-at-this-point-in-the-show moments (far from it!), but because I was watching the team absolutely nail it and I was just so bloody proud.
And perhaps that’s another thing I hadn’t expected.
I’ve spent a lot of my life on stages. I wondered whether being on the other side of it would ever feel quite as exciting.
It does. Just differently.
And then there was August…
Rehearsing a September show means asking a group of adults to spend their summer rehearsing a musical. Shockingly, they had not all coordinated their holidays with one another before auditioning. Very inconsiderate.
We always knew August would be difficult. Thankfully, the cast were really open from the start about their holidays, so we could plan around them as much as possible.
Even so, there were very few rehearsals where absolutely everybody was in the room. Would I therefore say, “Never do a September show”? Nope. It was challenging. We planned around it, we adapted and we made it work. And we’ll absolutely do it again.
Because sometimes the lesson isn’t don’t do the difficult thing. It’s just now you know how to do the difficult thing better.
Anyway, we survived August. Everyone eventually came back from their holidays. We put all the people in the same room again. A musical emerged. Success.
Although, while we’re talking about plans not quite going to plan … you may remember me telling you in an earlier blog that …
RENT wasn’t actually where we thought this whole thing would begin.
Everything happens for a reason?
Our original plan was Jesus Christ Superstar. We applied for the rights. They weren’t available for our dates. We were gutted.
So we changed direction and eventually landed on RENT. And last week, somebody in the cast said something to me that has really stuck.
RENT is a show about community. And because of the very nature of this show, something happened within this company that I don’t think we could ever have planned. They became one. Not just a cast who turned up, rehearsed their numbers and went home. A genuine community.
Would that have happened in exactly the same way with another show? We’ll never know.
But I’m genuinely not sure we could have chosen a better first production for That’s The Badger if we’d tried. So there’s another lesson. Sometimes the thing you’re disappointed about not getting makes way for the thing you were supposed to have.
RENT was the right first show. Maybe it was written in the stars.
And next year, we take on Jesus Christ Superstar … with a whole heap of lessons under our belt. And boy, have we got plans.
The moments where it became real
There wasn’t really one moment where I suddenly thought, Oh wow. This is actually good. There were loads of them.
The auditions: the level of talent walking through the door completely floored us. For one role, we had eleven men. Eleven. Men. For ONE musical-theatre role. When does that happen?! And every single one of them brought something different. They could all, quite plausibly, have done an amazing job with the role.
Because of the sheer volume of interest, we initially asked people to submit video auditions. And here came another lesson. Watching hours of video auditions is considerably less exciting than you imagine it’s going to be. More importantly, though, video can show you a lot. It cannot show you everything.
Stage presence is a strange thing. Chemistry is a strange thing. Somebody can come across one way on a screen and then walk into a room with other performers and suddenly there’s something completely different there. I’ll remember that next time.
The first run: about six weeks before the show. And it was incredible. At that stage, I’d never known anything quite like it. We still had six weeks to go and suddenly you could see the thing. Not the individual scenes or songs or choreography we’d been rehearsing.
The sitzprobe: 16+ weeks of listening to RehearScore. 16+ weeks of those same plonky backing tracks. Then the band started playing. I can only describe it as being reborn. There is something about hearing that music played live for the first time, with this cast singing it, after months of hearing a computer approximation of it, that just hits you
And suddenly: Bloody hell. We’re putting on RENT.
The best-laid hockey sticks
Of course, no matter how much you plan, everything changes the moment you actually get into the theatre. Throughout rehearsals we had red and yellow plastic hockey sticks laid across the floor to represent the steps and different levels of steel deck.
It was an excellent system.
Except that the cast seemingly remained incapable of remembering which imaginary staircase they were supposed to use. This drove Rick Hyland completely insane. If you know, you know.
And then, naturally, you get into the actual theatre and things change anyway.
Things you’ve planned for months don’t quite work. Something fits differently. Something needs moving. Something that worked perfectly yesterday suddenly decides it no longer wishes to participate. That’s theatre.
What matters (another lesson!) is having people around you who don’t panic when that happens. Ideally, you need somebody who actually seems to become more excited the bigger the problem is.
Enter Rick.
Rick has this incredible solution-focused ability to look at a problem as though it’s just presented him with a particularly enjoyable puzzle.
And there were things that still weren’t working as intended frighteningly close to opening night. But we got to opening night. They worked. And then they worked again. And again. Turns out panicking is rarely the solution.
Annoying, really. I’m quite good at panicking.
Oh, ticket sales…
Speaking of panicking. Ticket sales. Oh, ticket sales. This whole thing would have been so much more fun if we hadn’t had to sell tickets.
I knew ticket sales would be stressful. What I perhaps hadn’t anticipated was the mildly obsessive relationship I would develop with the Ticketsource. I checked it approximately 400 times a day. This is only a slight exaggeration.
I had spreadsheets. Obviously I had spreadsheets. I had forecasts. I had a target. I had a stretch target. I had a stretch-stretch target. I had a break-even target. And eventually, I had an “I’d be okay if we lost this amount of money” target.
We just about hit that one.
Success! Sort of. Would I recommend checking ticket sales 400 times a day? No. Did checking them for the 397th time that day make more people magically buy tickets? Also no.
Have I learned from this and will therefore be completely relaxed about ticket sales for our next production? Let’s not get carried away. But I absolutely need to find a healthier way of approaching it. Because here’s the thing.
Did we make money? No. Did we break even? No. Does that matter? Well… yes. And no.
We’re starting a business. We’re building a brand, building a reputation and, hopefully, building an audience that will come with us from one show to the next. And all of that takes time. We have to be pragmatic about that. Another lesson I’ve learned about producing theatre: pragmatism will be your superpower. Especially when you’re surrounded by creatives.
Your job is to let people dream big, throw ideas around and imagine what could be possible — while quietly keeping one eye on what is actually possible. Sometimes that means finding a way to make the brilliant idea happen. Sometimes it means finding a cheaper way to make the brilliant idea happen. And sometimes it means being the person who has to say, “Absolutely not, we cannot afford that.”
When I look at RENT, I see that this was production number one. We had no track record. No established Badger audience. Nobody had seen what a That’s The Badger show actually looked like. We were asking people to take a chance on us. Now they have.
People know who we are. People have seen what we can do. We’ve started building an audience, a reputation and a community around this slightly ridiculous thing we decided to create.
So if I look at our first production purely as a line on a profit-and-loss sheet, no, it wasn’t a financial success. But if I look at what we were actually trying to achieve? It was worth every penny. I’ll take that.
One thing I know we got right
There is one thing I don’t need hindsight to tell me we got right. Pay What You Can. I am so unbelievably proud that we did it, and it will absolutely continue. There were people sitting in that auditorium who otherwise wouldn’t have been there.
Maybe they desperately wanted to support a friend but £25 was simply too much of a stretch. Maybe they’d heard about the show and really wanted to see it. Maybe theatre just isn’t something they could ordinarily justify spending that amount of money on. Whatever their reason, they came.
And if you were one of those people: we could not have been happier to have you there. Truly. Those seats being filled by people experiencing the show meant far more to us than them sitting empty because somebody couldn’t afford the full ticket price.
Making theatre sustainable matters. Making theatre accessible matters too. We have to keep trying to do both.
The original moment of madness
Which brings me back to where all of this started. We made the decision to actually do this while driving down south to see Adam’s stepmum for what we sadly knew would be the last time.
It was a very sad time and, perhaps inevitably, it put some things into perspective. We had talked about starting a theatre company for years.
What if we did this? Wouldn’t it be amazing if…? One day we should…
And at some point on that journey, “one day” became: “We’re doing it.”
So we applied for the rights. We booked the theatre. And suddenly That’s The Badger Productions wasn’t something we talked about anymore. It existed.
There’s probably something in that which is bigger than producing musicals.
We spend so much of our lives talking about the things we’d love to do. What if I did this? What if I tried that? What if it goes wrong? Well…
What if it doesn’t?
Life is short. Take the risk. Take the chance. Do the slightly ridiculous thing. Will it work perfectly? Absolutely not.
Will your cast spend several months walking up the wrong imaginary staircase despite it being clearly marked by a bright yellow hockey stick? Almost certainly.
Will you lose hundreds of hours of your life, check ticket sales with increasingly concerning frequency, discover that your job description apparently includes emergency wig-access management and completely abandon your garden until it resembles the set of The Jungle Book? Quite possibly.
But you might also find yourself sitting at the back of a theatre watching something that once existed only in your imagination happening right in front of you. Surrounded by people who believed in it too.
And thinking: we actually bloody did it.
So, was the moment of madness a good idea? Potentially inspired. And would we do it all again? Well … We already are.
Oh, and I have made another “crazy” life choice. But I will save that one for next time!
Thanks for reading.
Love, Lucy 🦡🤍
Photo credit: Russell O’Callaghan