By opening night of a performing arts piece, the producer’s job is still not done. Instead of thinking about closing night, you’re now thinking about how to make sure that the run is productive and that you’re able to get people to come see the show. That’s where the second and third phases of marketing will come into play. You’re now thinking about how to fill these seats.

You should always aim to try to get the first two shows sold out because a sold-out show is a great marketing plan. That is the first and foremost goal you should learn as a producer in performing arts education or online performing arts education.

Producer Malini Singh McDonald has worked on a few shows like that. Once those first two shows are sold out, they were able to then shift to marketing and use some other posters that had been included in the marketing plan. On that note, it may be a good idea to have a few different posters that you can use at different times, so it’s not just one graphic. They use that in addition to seat fillers. There’s a lot of programs out there that you can use to help fill seats.

Surprisingly, what inspired a very young August Wilson as a high school student was not theater, not Black theater, but Black poetry. When August Wilson was in high school, he went to his teacher one day and said, “Here’s my latest project. Here’s my assignment.” It was the original poems he’d been writing.

They were so good that the teacher refused to believe that this biracial, self-identifying African-American teenager could have written this thing. He accused August Wilson of plagiarism. August Wilson said, “No, I wrote it myself.”

The teacher didn’t believe him, so August Wilson refused to go back. August Wilson dropped out of high school, never returned, and went to his mother and told her what happened.

His mother tried to make him go back, but August stood firm. He dropped out and never returned again. Instead, August Wilson spent his late high school age years committed to studying Black poetry and the Black arts movement of African-American theater.

He eventually packed up and moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he partnered with the folks who founded the Penumbra Theatre Company. Then he sort of sat there, and watched, and saw performing arts theater occur. That’s where he cultivated his voice.

By the end of his career, he was celebrated for having bridged this decade cycle of one play per decade that captured the history of Black life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He’s now the savior of American theater. He created a huge sensation in the performing arts world, and people still fawn over him and his accomplishments.

He stood before a crowd of those who praised him for saving theater, but who themselves may not have been as actively championing Black theater as they could have been, to say no more needs to be done. He told his story, which helped to pass the torch to the next generation. His story inspired and continues to inspire those wanting to pursue a performing arts education or online performing arts education.

We can look at what would be defined as Vedic theater throughout online performing arts education. This particular theater is from the region that is what we would now call India, though, of course, those geographic boundaries haven’t been exactly the same over many, many, many hundreds of years. Thus, we refer to that area as the Vedic world.

There’s this amazing narrative that comes out of a really important text that was to be formulated much later, which comes out of the Vedic world. It’s called the Natya Sastra. The Natya Sastra is actually considered to be the sacred book of theater, according to Hindu philosophy. That’s already pretty cool, and as a theater maker, if there’s a sacred book of theater, I’m on board. One of the stories (there are many stories of this) in mythology is that, in fact, humanity had come to a point where it was starting to destroy itself. This is in antiquity, also regarded as the “ancient past.” And according to the mythology, the gods were very concerned. These, of course, are the Hindu gods and they have a meeting to gather and discuss what the future of humanity could and would be.

The story tells this amazing notion, an incredibly beautiful and charged idea, that one of the deities, a god named Shiva, would actually move humanity forward. The god Shiva would prevent humanity from destroying itself and instead, would actually propel its growth. He presented this idea, which excited the gods. And the question was, “How do we give it to humanity? How do we share this incredible gift?” And so Lord Shiva has an idea, he will plant that entire notion that he’s created in the brain of one human being named Bharata.

Bharata Introduces Performing Arts

Now, the word Bharata has a lot of roots in it with different definitions depending upon the region and time. Though it’s the name of this character in the story, it is also an old word for person, man, or human. Furthermore, it’s a very old word for artist. What the story is telling us is that the gods are planning to place this on an individual that they define as an artist. They place this idea in that individual’s head and so are born what are called the children of Bharata – which I think is really cool.

The Children of Bharata and Their Role in the Arts

Each of these children actually represents a part of the art forms and the idea is that they are similar to the next child that’s born. The youngest of the children is a child called music. They are supposed to be the purest and one of the most foundational. The next child of Bharata, which I think is really remarkable, is poetry. The idea is that poetry has music in it, so you see this kind of structure within structure. The next child that is born is called sculpture. I would call it visual art. The idea is that visual art has poetry and music within it. The next child that’s born is storytelling, which I think is a remarkable thing because that idea is that storytelling has visuals, poetry, and music within it. And the eldest of the children, that’s born with all of them inside of it, is theater.

This is the great gift from Lord Shiva. It entails the idea that theater is granted as a space that actually holds all of the other art forms and really propels this notion that it is for the intent of the growth of a community. I think it’s a really cool idea whether you subscribe to that philosophy or not. For me, it really brings forth the puzzle of theater, which is that it’s inherently this remarkable interdisciplinary art form that is intended to actually take a varying shape depending on its community, on its culture, and on its moment in history. Through Bharata and their children, we see it as a place of music, poetry, visual art, and storytelling.

The more interested you are, the more interesting you become. For actors, that’s particularly important because you want to be able to create a performance with your heart, mind, body, and voice that people will be able to picture themselves in. You can learn all this in your online performing arts education.

That’s the ultimate goal: to affect change in people. That’s why the theater exists. It’s like putting up a mirror and having people question something that they might not have questioned in the past.

What you have to offer as an artist is your weirdness, your unique point of view. It’s who you are, your sense of humor, the way you view the world. Think about comedians. For example, some comedians are funny because of how they view the world. They can make you think, “That’s funny. I never thought of it that way.”

You need to understand that your individual perspective is your currency as a performer. That’s what makes you unique, and that’s what’s going to give you a long career because you’re going to be different than everyone else. And that difference is something to celebrate. Cultivate that because there’s no one who can be a better “you” than you, and that’s going to make you stand out. Whether it’s on camera or onstage, they’re going to go, “Oh, that’s different!” And that’s what you want.

As you continue your performing arts education, remember this: Don’t try to fit a mold. Just be you.

Discussing performing arts, “I think that live performance is incredibly democratic,” says Scott Illingworth. “Unlike film or television, which have unique storytelling tools such as cut and frame, live performance allows the viewer or audience member to make their own choices about what they pay attention to — the parts of people’s bodies, which person they pay attention to, how they turn their attention back and forth between performers over the course of the event.”

While offering performing arts education, Illingworth goes on to explain, “It’s hard to state how significant that is in terms of the audience experience. At any given moment, you could be paying close attention to an actor’s face and what’s going on. Then suddenly, you find yourself drawn to the tapping of their foot. It requires, therefore, that actors are incredibly clear in the use of their entire bodies.” Illingworth concludes by stating that it also permits audience members to tell or experience the story in the way they want, based on the things that draw them in. He thinks one of the reasons it continues to last is that people keep finding new ways of rewarding audience members for that kind of experience and attention. This sort of lesson is also taught in online performing arts education.

The most common form of theater across time and space has been solo performance. Think of a storyteller going into a public space, often accompanying themselves with music or speaking in poetry. These performers go by different names: bard, rhapsode, skald. In some ways, a rap artist is a direct inheritor of that tradition.

But Jeff Kaplan says, “When we think of a play in a theater with the lights off and a curtain and we applaud at the end, that form really begins in the 19th century.”

That might sound strange, but it’s true. Kaplan points to the year 1876 as an important turning point in performing arts education. In that year, the German composer Richard Wagner built an opera house in Bayreuth, Germany. In that opera house, the audience all sat facing the stage.

That was different from anything previously known. Before, the lights would be on, and the upper class would sit on the sides facing each other. They wanted to see what each other looked like. The middle class would sit in the middle, and the lower class would sit up in the high areas and throw things and yell and scream.

It was very raucous. It was very much a social event. Kaplan elaborates, “This modern notion in which we’re all sitting very quietly, and we’ve all purchased a ticket so we can consume the content, you know, that’s actually pretty recent.”

As you move through a European idea of theater, you’ll come to Shakespeare the verse plays. Next in online performing arts education, you’ll move on through the 19th century and the creation of naturalism and realism. Of those styles, Elizabeth Bradley explains, “We’re meant to actually suspend disbelief and feel that lives we can relate to are being reflected on stages.”

Realism and naturalism are terms that are often put together, conflated or used interchangeably. Bradley uses a recent important revival of “Our Town” — considered by many an iconic American play — as an example.

Of that particular production, she says, “Using all of our senses as an audience was important. So actual bacon was frying on stage in an actual frying pan in real time. And that’s an example of a kind of heightened realism.”

We still have the (David) Belasco Theatre on Broadway. In the very early years of the 20th century, David Belasco was a producer who believed that every detail added to a certain sense of verisimilitude, the sense that it is real, that it is truthful. Bradley shares, “So every afternoon, he would bring in real shanks of meat to hang on the stage, and they would ripen, so to speak, under the lights during the productions.”

Kaplan says, “Another date I’d point to is 1879, [when] a playwright named Henrik Ibsen wrote a play about a woman named Nora who is in an unhappy marriage.” As viewers watch the play, they discover that Nora has a secret. They also learn that there’s not really a bad guy; there’s not really a villain.

He continues, “And in the end, she walks out — spoiler alert, I’m sorry — but she walks out [on] her family on Christmas at night in Norway without a coat, and she slams the door. And it was the door; it was the door slam heard around the world. Women just didn’t do that.”

With that, theater had spoken truth to power forever. Shakespeare’s Hamlet says that theater is a mirror held up to nature. That’s the beginning of theater’s relationship with modern identity politics. Ever since, plays have really gone where things are sticky.

Take Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” for example. It’s about the American dream. “After World War II, who can dream?” Kaplan asks. “Does that include an African-American family living on the South Side of Chicago who wants to buy a house in the suburbs? Are they allowed to dream?”

And so, ever since then, performing arts has addressed key issues that confront us to this day and, in fact, right now.

In the process of writing a play, Robert Galinsky states, “I’ve discovered there’s not one right way to do it.” There are many different ways to produce a successful stage story in the performing arts. One of the plays I was writing utilized the advice of Robert McKee, an incredible story structure artist. His main tip is this: Writing is rewriting, is rewriting, is rewriting. The willingness to review and revise your playscript is the key to optimizing your story. Reading McKee’s books and articles is the first step to a performing arts education.

Focusing on the story is one of the most effective ways to write plays. Galinsky recommends that writers should “write the story. Rewrite the story. Rewrite the story again and rewrite it some more. Don’t be afraid to honestly appraise the story, and be willing to eliminate weak plot points or write better ones.”

Every time your characters want to speak, don’t let them. If a brilliant line comes to mind, jot it down. But don’t start writing with dialogue. Start writing with the story and develop a plot.

When your story is really cooked, and you love it, now, open the door and let the characters start talking. They’re dying to speak. They will know what to say because the story is so strong.

That’s one way to do it. But another way to write your play is if you know the characters so well that you can let them go ahead and speak. Galinsky says, “I put them in a room on a piece of paper, and I get them to start talking. I will create an outline while they’re talking, and they help me discover where we are going with this conversation.”

Don’t think there’s a right way or a wrong way to write a play. There are many different ways that depend on where you’re at in your life and what you’re interested in and excited about. Robert Galinsky loves writing the story, story, story until they’re ready to speak. But, he also knows “the five characters inside and out, so I’m going to let them start talking and keep talking.”

All of a sudden some gems of lines can come up, and they’re driving the plot. That’s exciting, too, because when you’re an audience watching a story-driven performance in the theater, it’s different than film. Because the performance is story-driven in the theater, it’s great when the characters take a twist or turn that you don’t expect. And many times, that is only going to happen because of the characters’ response with dialogue, not necessarily their thinking about where the story should go. Watching a play can be an online performing arts education if you are aware of these drama elements.

Scott Illingworth shares with us that in moving from audience to participant as a performing arts director, the period of time you have with a script is a unique and individual, and only you can utilize it for insight and productivity. For a director, the journey is similar to that of an actor at the beginning of a production. This is because, in many ways, the director is the audience until the viewers can be present. It’s important to start, bit by bit, from the place of what the story is about and what the audience needs to understand. What are the critical events? What are the significant moments?

From a performing arts education perspective, a director will question how the audience is going to experience the story based on their level of insight. It’s hard to recapture that initial impression if you don’t make notes and think about the meaning during your first time through a script. But once you’ve done that, it’s a director’s job to help the rest of the team— that includes designers, actors and technical staff—to begin to construct a shared view of the world in that story.

Sometimes the created world of the plot is clearly obvious from the text. But many playwrights don’t have such specific information in their text about what the world should look like or how the viewers should perceive it. So, it’s important that you collaborate with other team members like designers to ensure that you work together to build this imaginary world you’re inviting the actors into as part of the process.

He says, “Another thing that directors don’t always think about is something that I’ll often refer to as ‘the machine of the play.'” He thinks that a really well-written play or well-written film script is like an incredibly intricate machine. All the pieces perform certain functions. They’re all meant to communicate particular ideas along the way. The lines are specific. They’re chosen to take the audience on the journey of this story. So, like any complicated machine, if one of the pieces is out of place, if it’s not doing its job quite right or if it doesn’t fit properly with the other elements, that’s something the audience will experience really quickly. An online performing arts education can help directors become familiar with this approach to reading a script before production begins.

While working on a play, it’s important that the director apply this constant process of zooming back out to see if the machine in its entirety is still working. Then, you will zoom back in to tinker with specific elements, whatever they are, that are not working correctly. Sometimes it’s about working with an actor or actors on a scene. Other times, it’s about rethinking something you thought was understood at the beginning but have grown to understand differently over the course of the process. Presenting a successful big picture on the stage or in film begins with the director’s minute examination of the script.

A musical director in a theatrical show, in a Broadway show, or in a musical is the person who is the head of the show’s music department. So, a musical director is a person who is in control of how the music is expressed. The musical director typically teaches the music, and music on a page is one thing, but music inside bodies is another thing.

First of all, what is the story? The musical director should have a very clear idea of the story, and that idea should be something where they are in collaboration and conversation with the writers, assuming they’re alive and present. They should certainly be in communication with the director who is in control of the entire production in a musical theater piece. Typically, the choreographer and lighting designer are also involved in these conversations.

You’re all creating this big animal together that takes a lot of people to put together. There’s music. There are costumes. There’s hair. There’s movement. There’s acting. There’s figuring out where on stage things happen. What’s the best way for someone to sing? How should they pronounce this word? What word should they hit? What syllables should they hit in a particular melody?

How should that melody come out? Should it be loud or soft? Should it have vibrato or not have vibrato? All of these questions are ones that are inside the musical director’s province.

Additionally, the musical director is also sometimes playing the show, playing the piano, playing the guitar. If there’s a band, typically, the musical director is integrating the band—controlling how the band sounds and how they sound with the actors. And when I say how it sounds, in larger shows, there will be someone who takes the music that they’re given, whether it’s written down or not, and they will orchestrate it. They will decide what instruments are going to play. They’ll decide how things are arranged.

If you have an interest in pursuing a career as a musical director, or any career in the performing arts, consider exploring online performing arts education. Obtaining a solid performing arts education will help equip you with the knowledge and skills you need to reach many of your goals.

There are many valuable lessons found in online performing arts education. Based on his experience in performing arts, Gianni Downs tells us, “There are three major stage configurations. There is the proscenium stage, which is essentially what you might think of as a theater. A lot of the Broadway houses are proscenium stages. You might see musicals produced on a proscenium stage.” These are set up so that the audience is on one side, and the action is happening on another side, often with a frame around the action. That is the proscenium arch itself. This is a very common type of theater and is very useful for hiding scene changes. Musicals spend a lot of time in proscenium stages.

“A proscenium is an arch,” says Jeff Kaplan, who has years of performing arts education. “Next time that you’re in a theater, look at the shape above the curtain. It makes a picture frame. So, the idea is that you’re looking into a diorama. You’re looking into a world. And traditionally, the performers are inside that world, and you and the audience are on the outside. That forms the fourth wall, but that’s not the only way that you can do it.”

Gianni Downs picks up from there. “Another common theater-type is the 3/4 thrust. You’ll see a lot of regional theaters and off-Broadway theaters will use a 3/4 thrust stage. This is where the action will project into the audience, making a horseshoe shape of the audience. So, the audience sits on 3/4 of the sides of the action of the play.” This is often more used for straight plays or more intimate plays. A very famous 3/4 thrust is the Guthrie Theater, and it might provide a good reference for what that looks like.

Jeff Kaplan then finishes, “There’s theater-in-the-round, which is pretty much what it sounds like. The audience is on all sides, or maybe 3/4. Arena Stage in Baltimore is a very famous example of that.” Circle in the Square in New York is largely a theater-in-the-round. That’s a fascinating experience in which there’s no front where you’re all inside of this world. It’s like a virtual-reality theater.