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There's been a flurry of "theatres reinvent radio drama" articles lately. I am a theatre producer turned fiction podcaster. And since the pandemic started I have had ~5 meetings with theatre companies considering audio work. I have a lot of thoughts. A thread. https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1280920374323154945
This particular article is fine. It's mostly about using voice acting as an educational tool in an acting conservatory... And I think all these articles are b/c the theatre journalists need to write about s'thing and they are scraping the bottom of a barrel.
None of the theaters I have spoken to so far can afford to make audio projects. NONE OF THEM. There are a bunch of reasons why (IMHO). Here are a couple I think are important.
1. Theatres make money from local audiences who show up in person and from donors who think theatre is cool. Podcasts make money from a regular release and proven audience base that can be turned into ad money or donors.
1a. I can not for the life of me figure out how you make 1 radio drama and monetize it effectively. Unless you are Very Famous (ex: insert celebrity here, or The Public Theatre).
2. There is a lot of cross over b/tw theatre and audio drama. But its sort of like if you took all the same ingredients and one day made a pizza and the next day made a lasagna. It's very different.
2a. This means that different people in the process are more/less involved. You pay your actors WAY LESS and your sound designer WAY MORE. So if theatres are trying to preserve jobs, this is sort of a trick. B/c it's not the same jobs.
2b. This is the thing I feel like all these articles really miss. That WaPo article spends 90% talking about the actors and then like 2 sentences being "also some engineers added sound effects!" - That is a very bad representation of how the work actually gets made.
Thank you for coming to my rant. And if you are a theatre that wants to make audio work - please feel free to talk to me. I am happy to chat... but be prepared that this isn't cheaper than making a play.
My back of the envelope budget where you hire my team to produce your 90 minute 1 act play as a radio drama is ~$20K. That means you bring a writer, director, and actors and we do everything else (production support, recording, dialogue editing, sound design).
