How to Organize a Christmas Musical

Christmas time is a time for fun, a time for presents, a time for remembering, and a time for a multitude of musical and theater offerings. If you have been asked to produce or direct a musical, or have a desire to produce or direct a musical, it can be a stressful task to pull off. However, with the right plan and superior organization, your musical will go off without a hitch.

Instructions

1. Choose the musical. There are a host of different Christmas musicals available for your performance. Your choice will depends on a couple of different things. First off you want to look at how many people you desire to have involved and what level of ability those people will have. Musicals vary in cast size and difficulty. You do not want to pick a musical for adults with professional vocal ranges for a group of children, nor do you want to choose a musical that only has four parts for a group of fifty. Once you choose your musical, you will need to arrange payment of royalties to the publisher.

2. Cast your musical. Now that you have chosen your musical you will need to send out a casting call. You will need a venue for your casting auditions, a panel made up of your musical director, choreographer, and other directing staff, a piano player that can read music on the fly, and patience. The auditioning process can be one of the most tedious processes of your musical. It also is the most important as choosing the right people for your show will determine whether it succeeds or fails.

3. Start rehearsals. The next step is to form a rehearsal calendar and distribute it to your cast. Be sure to express to your cast that attendance is not optional. You may feel that you are being overbearing as a director or may feel that you will lose parts of your cast for demanding attendance, but you have to stress rehearsals or you will have a frequency of absences guaranteed. Since you are demanding their attendance, be sure to not waste their time. Just as important as scheduling the dates of your rehearsals is scheduling what you will be doing during the rehearsal. If you are not going to get to your chorus, do not have them show up. If all you are going to get to is chorus numbers that don't require your leads, give them that day off. If you respect your cast, they will respect you.

4. Put out promotions. How will people come to your show if they don't know about it? Send out posters, radio ads, newspaper ads, news interviews, whatever you can possibly do to promote your show go through with it. Your cast will also be a huge tool for promotion. Give them posters or even put them into teams to go out into your community and promote your show.

5. It's show time. So you have done everything you can to get the news out about your show and you have chosen the best cast possible for your production, now it's time to show the world what you've done. Be sure that you have done adequate dress and technical rehearsals before opening night. This will assure that your opening night is not just another dress rehearsal but a polished performance that will make your attendees feel that their money spent was worthwhile. If you keep quality in mind and stay organized, professional, and respectful to your cast you will have a long successful run.

Tips & Warnings

• The success of your Christmas musical will be based on two things, quality, and promotion. Do not underestimate these two things if you plan on doing any musicals in the future.