the pain of r&d
To quote Kevin McCollum, "theatre is research and development…your goal is to enter the marketplace with the least amount of cost and test the market to see if anyone likes what you’ve created". We closed "The J.A.P. Show" tonight because the punters didn’t like what we created – well, actually, the ones who came seemed to really like it, but they didn’t like it enough to drag their friends back.
It’s not surprising when a new show closes. In any field, the research process is going to throw up more honorable failures than successes. And it’s a pretty random process: rarely are either the hits or misses predictable.
Big success depends on that rare, but hugely rewarding, random win. The problem is, each entry in the lottery is hard. If you followed the advice of The Black Swan, my oft cited favorite book de jour, you might make small gambles on supposedly impossible events in the financial markets – say, the Euro going to $2 or Google stocks crashing – and only lose your investment when it doesn’t pay off, which is most of the time. But producing a show – and esp. a low budget show – requires huge personal effort and energy and emotion. Even a small show like this one, capitalized at under $200,000, takes a big personal investment, so its hard for everyone when they close.