The Producer's Perspective: As a general manager of Broadway and Off Broadway shows for over 15 years, I have continually been dismayed by my close friends’ inability to remember what I do (“he’s a stage manager”; NOT) or what it entails. How could they? My job title is completely opaque. What is that mysterious thing that I manage, generally? Finally, out of frustration and self-defense, I wrote a book and cleverly called it ‘Broadway General Manager”, to clue them in. Then, in sympathy for their confusion, I subtitled it “Demystifying the Most Important and Least Understood Role in Show Business” to give them hope.
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The theatre industry is constantly changing. As it does, the roles and responsibilities do as well. This article gives the reader a cursory look at the job of a general manager, in the context of Broadway. This position focuses on the keeping a production on budget and managing contracts through a significant amount of negotiation. It seems to overlap with the duties of a production manager, but there are a few differences. Because multiple different levels of theatre exist (educational, regional, commercial), multiple similar roles do as well. For example, a stage manager in high school does is not given nearly as much responsibility over the safety of the actors as a professional would be. It even differs in the same scale; LORT theatres have different letter grade ratings depending on their size and scope. For this reason, one must be ready to adapt to whichever kind of production and creative/technical team they find themselves in.
The article gives a very good overview of what the role of a general manager is for large scale commercial productions. We always joke that no one knows what a stage manager does outside of our industry, but I would definitely agree with this article that people understand what general manager does even less. Even within our program I would argue that we don't go into the details of what someone with title does on a large-scale show or at a big production company. Something that I found really interesting within article was the discussion of Production budget versus on Operating budget. Since we are all students working on shows here we don't have to think about show maintenance on a salary basis, and as our longest runs are only two weeks the long-term issues that a general manager would face a Broadway show. The only time we have to think about show maintenance from a financial aspect is when we use consumables in a show, and even so this is typically negligibly when compared to the overall budget.
I am definitely going to go and read this book now. Theater is so weird with its nomenclature for positions, see Stage Manager vs. Assistant Stage Manager and the number of times I’ve had to explain to my dad why in this instance it’s not just “Assistant.” When you look at what we have with the word manager in it, it’s no wonder people get confused. Production Manager is not a General Manager is not a Stage Manager is not, is not, is not. I also appreciate that Bogyo was told “750 words, sum up what you do.” I’d actually like to take a poll and give multiple production, stage, and general managers 750 words to sum up their positions and see the responses for comparison. Maybe we could come up with really handy fast descriptions that encompass everything each of those positions are responsible for to help standardize what we do.
This is interesting to the point that I might want to read the book. I only had a very vague and overly simplified understanding of general manager that basically general managers and production managers have similar work duties in different scales. Production managers deal with production level whereas the general managers cope with the entire company. They both deal with budgets and personnel as their major job duties. This article taught me an interesting aspect about general managers and how the interact with every level of the production. Working in backstage and on stage, we rarely get to interact with anyone outside the production team, and I thought it would be the same for the people in the business side. But really, to lead a theater company, general managers do need to communicate with everyone in the company, including production personnel. It may not trickle down to the stagehands and crew level, but it was an interesting and new perspective offered by the article.
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