Opera/Performance Management Software

[Svenfilm]

Good Morning

 

 

What software would you recommend using for the planning and production management for a theatre/Opera performance production.

 

Currently in the process of getting a project together and would like to use a tool that can assist in doing all the planning, costing, staffing etc.

 

Any advise would be greatly appreciated.

 

Kind Regards

Sven

[mac.calder]

Ungerboeck is probably the most prevalent "Performance Centre" management platform out there.. That said, it is not a a magic bullet and it is not cheap and is designed for a venue or theatre company and not a specific show.

 

For a single performance - knowing your MS suite is probably the best advice. Especially if your company puts everyone onto office365. MS teams is great for collaboration - you can do shared production calendars and the like, share documents, etc.

 

Costing and Budgetting... Excel would be my recommendation - however it does depend on how granular you want to get. Do you want to budget down to the last screw - or do you tend to apportion funds in lump sums to various departments?

 

Individual productions run on spreadsheets. I would say that most theatre companies also run on spreadsheets - it is just that they might have a financial system sitting there in the background to help with the accounting side of things. I know my old events company (annual turnover for our venue, which was the largest, was $5m in events, and we had about 40 other venues at the time) did all of their budget forecasting in excel. Sure, prior year data was pulled from our ridiculously over featured, expensive and clunky accounting package - but at the end of the day, the actual forecasts and budgets were in Excel.

 

Regarding scheduling - depending on how re-usable it will be for you (ie if it is a one off show with a week of rehearsals and a cast of 5 people, don't bother), you can do some awesome lookups in the latest version of excel which would allow you to have an actor/scene breakdown - so that when you add a call on the main page and select the scenes that are being rehearsed, it automatically pulls in all the names/roles associated with that call. There are tonnes of other bits of automation you can do in excel without needing to delve into macros and programming.