It's week four of rehearsals, and your Act Two transitions are a barrage of mic hand-offs... that just aren't working.
That's not really what went wrong. What went wrong happened in a room eight months ago, when somebody said "what about Into the Woods?" and somebody else said "I love that show," and everyone agreed, and nobody said out loud that it needs twenty principals with microphones and your company owns twelve.
Season selection is the biggest decision you make all year. It sets your budget, your casting problems, your build, your rehearsal calendar, and how many people come. And most of us make it the way we'd pick a restaurant: a conversation, a few strong opinions, a vote.
Here's a way to make it that holds up.
Show selection is a constraints problem wearing a costume
Choosing a show feels like a taste question. It isn't. Taste narrows the list to eight titles you'd be proud to direct. After that it's arithmetic: how many people audition for you, what you can costume, what you can spend, how many microphones you own, how many weeks you have, and what your board will sit through.
The reason a good show goes wrong in week three is almost never that it was a bad show. It's that the constraint that killed it was knowable in September and nobody wrote it down.
So the process below runs in a specific order, and the order is the whole trick: your constraints go on paper before a single title does. Look at titles first and you will bend the numbers to fit the show you already want. Everyone does. Writing the numbers down first is the only defense.
Step 1 — Write down your constraints before you look at anything
Ten numbers. Half an hour. Do this before the selection meeting, not during it.
Your typical audition turnout. Not the number you hope for. The number that actually showed up last year, and the year before. If you're a school, be honest about how much the fall sport takes.
How many of those can sing what. For musicals this matters more than the total. Most companies have plenty of sopranos and a chronic shortage of low voices.
The largest cast you can costume. This is a different ceiling from turnout, and it's usually higher — which is exactly why it gets forgotten. Thirty people can audition for you and you can still only afford to dress twenty-six.
Your total production budget. Everything: royalties, rentals, set, costumes, music.
Performances, and what each one realistically brings in. Multiply. That's your ceiling, and it's the number that turns "we can afford it" into a real answer.
Microphones you own. Count them. Not the ones you could borrow if the high school says yes.
Pit musicians you can pay, and whether your company will accept tracks. Some boards won't. Better to know in September.
What your shop can actually build. Unit set only? Moderate build? Full build with automation? Be unkind to yourself here.
Rehearsal weeks available. Real ones, after the holiday your calendar forgot.
Your content ceiling, and who enforces it. Family, PG-13, or adult — and whether the person who decides is your board, your principal, or your audience. This one isn't a number, and it kills the most shows late.
Every check that follows measures against this list. Skip it and everything downstream becomes an opinion again.
Step 2 — Build a long list, deliberately
Eight to twelve titles. Longer than feels comfortable.
The instinct is to arrive with two favorites and pick one. Resist it, because a two-title list means you're really choosing between yes and no on a show you already love, and you'll find reasons.
Pull from more than one place:
- Your licensors' catalogs, filtered by cast size — most of them let you do this
- Titles you've seen and can't stop thinking about
- What your company has never done. Check what you produced in the last five years, and what the company or school down the road just did — a title that played twenty minutes away is a hard sell
- One title somebody else suggests. Ask your stage manager, your music director, and one board member for a name each. Include all three even if you wince
- One title you think you can't afford. You want at least one row that fails loudly. It calibrates the rest of the list
Write down the licensor for each one while you're there. You'll need it twice later, and looking it up again is a small tax you'll pay eight times.
Step 3 — Cast the show on paper
For each title, find the cast breakdown and record four things.
Named roles and ensemble range. Most published breakdowns give a minimum and a maximum. Record both — the minimum tells you if it's possible, the maximum tells you what it wants to be.
Roles written gender-specific, and roles that are flexible. This is more useful than an M/F count, and it's how most licensors now describe their casts. A show with fourteen written-male roles is a different problem from a show with fourteen roles that happen to have been cast male on Broadway.
Voice parts, for musicals. Not "it's SATB." Specifically: does this show live or die on one belt mezzo? Does it need a legit soprano who can hold a tessitura you've never had in the building?
The one hard casting requirement. Every show has one — the role that, if you can't cast it, you cannot do the show. Write it in a sentence. A Witch. A Jo who can belt and carry it. An adult man over fifty who will commit to eight weeks.
Then compare the maximum cast against two of your numbers: what you can costume first, then what normally auditions. Anything over the costume ceiling is already over the turnout ceiling, so check the bigger number first or you'll never see the costume problem at all.
And ask whether doubling is available. A show that needs twenty-four with no doubling and eighteen with it is two different shows on your budget.
Step 4 — Cost it honestly, in six lines
One number per title is a wish. Six is an estimate.
- Royalty per performance × number of performances. Royalties scale with your run. A show that's affordable for four nights may not be for eight
- Script and score rental
- Materials and perusal fees. Small, real, and always forgotten
- Set and props
- Costumes
- Music — orchestra, tracks, rehearsal accompanist
Add them up, then subtract from your projected income. The number you get is not a verdict. Some shows are worth running at a loss, and you're the one who decides which. But you should decide it on purpose, in September, rather than discover it in April.
One warning: your estimates are estimates. Licensors quote based on your venue, your seat count, your ticket price, and your dates. Two companies get two different numbers for the same title. Confirm before you commit — never from a chart, and never from a friend's memory of what they paid.
Step 5 — Production demands, and the question underneath them
Set complexity: unit set, two or three locations, multi-scene, or something that flies. Effects and hazards — fog, firearms, falls from height, a trap. Costume load and how many quick changes. Microphones needed against microphones owned. Rehearsal weeks the show wants against rehearsal weeks you have.
These are all arithmetic, and they're all easy.
The hard one is content.
Write down what's actually in the show — language, violence, substance use, sexuality, suicide, anything a parent will call about — and then answer a different question: will the person who has to approve this approve it? Not whether it's a good play. Not whether the objection is fair. Whether your board, your principal, your district, or your subscribers will sit through it.
A show can clear every number in the process and still be wrong for your company. That isn't a failure of the process. That's the process working, and it's why the content question deserves its own line instead of living in somebody's stomach until March.
Step 6 — Check the rights before you fall in love
Do this earlier than feels necessary.
Availability isn't guaranteed. Amateur rights get withdrawn when a professional production is announced, sometimes years ahead.
Regional holds are real. A tour booked within a radius of your venue can close a title for your entire season. You will not find this out by reading the catalog. You find out by asking.
Lead times vary a lot. Some licensors turn an application around in days. Some take months. Ask for a timeline when you inquire, write it down, and follow up when it passes.
Track four things per title: the date you inquired, the date you applied, the date you were told to expect an answer, and where it stands right now. That fourth column is the one that saves you, because "we applied in March" and "we have permission" are very different sentences, and by June they blur.
Record denials too. Next year somebody will suggest the same title, and "we asked, they said no, here's the date" is a thirty-second conversation instead of a thirty-day one.
Step 7 — Score it, weight it, and write down why
Now you have eight titles and a page of facts about each. Rank them.
Score each title 1 to 5 on six things: casting fit, budget fit, production feasibility, community fit, artistic value, and audience draw. Then — and this is the part people skip — decide how much each one matters to you. A company with a deep bench and no money should not weight casting and budget equally. A school with a mandate to serve as many students as possible should weight cast size far above draw.
Set your weights, apply them, and see what comes out on top.
The ranking is not the decision. It's an argument, and it's most useful when it disagrees with you, because then you have to say why — and "the numbers favor this one but we're doing the other one because of X" is a much stronger position in front of a board than "we all just liked it."
Then write one sentence per title about why it's in or out. Including the ones you cut. Especially the ones you cut.
Do not delete the shows you didn't pick. Strike them through and leave them on the page. Next year, someone will suggest the title you already ruled out, and the sentence you wrote in September will save your whole meeting.
When to do this
For schools, selection usually runs January through May for the following fall — early enough that rights come back before summer. For community theaters it often starts earlier, because seasons get announced ahead of subscription renewals.
Whenever your window is, work backward from the date you need permission in hand and add a month. Rights are the only part of this process you don't control.
Bringing it to the room
Two things make a selection meeting go well.
Bring the constraints first, and get agreement on them before any title is discussed. Once you're arguing about Into the Woods you're not going to get a clean answer about how many microphones you own.
Bring the shows you cut, and the reasons. Nothing builds confidence in a recommendation like being able to show the seven titles that didn't make it and say exactly what stopped each one. A board that can see the reasoning stops relitigating the choice.
If you'd rather not build the spreadsheet yourself
Everything above works on paper, and it works in a blank Google Sheet if you're willing to spend an evening building one. I spent that evening so you don't have to.
The Show Selection Spreadsheet is $9. Seven tabs, one per step above.
Shows you rule out get struck through and kept, on every tab, with your reason beside them.
It comes with a filled example: a fictional community theater working through eight real titles on a $9,500 budget, with every check visibly firing — including one show that clears every single number in the workbook and gets ruled out anyway, for the only reason a spreadsheet can't check.
Fifteen titles. Google Sheets. Yours to copy and keep.
Get the Show Selection Spreadsheet →
Once you've chosen, the Season Planning Grid takes over: auditions, rehearsals, and tech laid out across the calendar.
Pick the show your company can actually do, and week four of rehearsal is just week four.
Break a leg,
Jenn — theater✶ish
Do it in ten minutes