Producer Boot Camp Gives Theater Hope

“How many of you went into theater for security?” joked Theatre Resources Unlimited’s Vice President Cheryl Davis in her opening lecture at Producer Boot Camp.

While the current financial crisis has humbled many, it seems that no sector of the American population has adopted theater producers’ unparalleled self-deprecation. TRU—a nonprofit organization that seeks to educate and support producers from all walks of life—hosted last Saturday’s Producer Boot Camp at the Players Theatre. The step-by-step workshop served as a means of assuaging the growing fears surrounding the plummeting economy and, in particular, January’s Black Sunday, which marked the closing of nine Broadway shows on the fourth of the month.

The eight-hour workshop included a series of lectures on networking, commercial and not-for-profit financing, and cultivating investors. Its guest lecturers—who ranged from TRU veterans like Davis to Broadway box-office legends such as Richard Frankel of Hairspray and The Producers—all but overlooked the financial crisis, emphasizing instead the personal pleasure and necessity of their work.

The sixty producers who attended the event were a diverse crowd: a handful of Broadway veterans, a couple of students, a smattering of artists who identified themselves as “reluctant” producers, one recent Hollywood emigrant (who told a polite crowd that film production is “just as hard” as theatre production) and a man who began his producing career after Davis rode in the backseat of his taxi.

Nearly every Boot Camp lecturer noted that it takes a talented individual to work in production. Each stressed the importance of building friendships and connections, and many spoke of the necessity of maintaining a thick skin throughout the complicated process of raising money and building a team of artists and investors.

Even within Columbia student theater, which functions in much the same way as many professional companies, the producer’s role is one that only a handful of persistent students have come to demystify—often via trial and error.

Sonali Bhasin, BC ’10, co-founded a theatre company at home in Delhi, India before producing two shows for CU Players here in New York. Her peer and mentor Ameneh Bordi, CC’10, has gained a name within the performing arts circuit as one of Columbia’s most prolific undergraduate producers.

Bordi has consulted fledgling producers and worked to revise the structure of the CU Players governing board, for which she serves as president. But she admits that even her own path has been rocky: “By sheer force I blustered my way through,” she said.

On one hand, it’s hard to understand how the number of New Yorkers willing to work in a marginalized, economically ravaged industry could fill the Players Theater. On the other, one may be hard-pressed to find another group so motivated by the same inexhaustible passion that drives Bhasin and Bordi to work without even the possibility of financial gain.

Sharon Carr—a producer whose Broadway credits include Legally Blonde—told her audience, “Whether it’s raise $50,000 or $2 million, you will do it. You will do it because you have to.” She added that she continues producing because she wants to “bring joy to the world.”
Bhasin expressed a similar sentiment. “It [producing] makes me feel so good about myself,” she said.

It seems that whether one is producing undergraduate work here at Columbia or professional theater in New York, there is no doubt that passion and gumption for the task at hand will ultimately lead to success—no matter what the financial situation.