Tale #42: Gold in the Garbage

To produce quality theater at any level can be a very expensive endeavor. Ticket sales and donations make up the majority of a community theater’s income. At VACT, the majority of the operating budget went towards show expenses and building operation costs.

Now a budget for a specific production (say Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka) would be approved at a Board Meeting before the show began production. A budget proposal would account for licensing rights, estimated set/costume/prop expenses, staff compensation (pit musicians, music director, choreographer, etc), and all other expenses combined with estimated revenue from ticket sales, cast participation fees, and any other ways of bringing in money.

Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka, which we performed in June 2018, was a surprisingly pricey title to license from Music Theatre International. I had seen other licensing agreements before and it was a significantly more expensive title. As a first time producer I felt like the licensing costs alone put me in a bit of a hole, especially knowing how quickly the elaborate set/costumes/props that the director wanted would add up. Oh and there was flying. That’s really expensive.

However, Willy Wonka is a well known title. We felt comfortable predicting high ticket sales for a family-friendly, well-known, all-ages, short and sweet summer musical. Plus, there was a built-in, guaranteed, additional source of revenue.

We could sell Candy.

Not only that, we could hide Golden Tickets and give the winner an opportunity to go on stage in the second act.

Our director was very excited to present this idea and said she would take care of ordering Wonka Bars and printing golden tickets.

As the producer of such a large purple monster of a musical, I was glad to have it taken off of my hands.

The first weekend of shows, people were lining up to buy the wonka bars for a chance at a golden ticket. My job was to be stationed in the lobby at intermission to await the excited winner to run up and claim their prize.

Only opening night, there was no winner.

I was so confused. I knew the winning bar had been sold because I saw where it had been placed in the basket.

Rewinding a bit, that same night, Sound Guy Dale’s grandson (Lighting Guy Steve’s nephew) was sitting up in the light booth with his uncle to watch the show. His mom was playing an Oompa Loompa in the cast. Since Steve was going to need to focus on lights, I had offered to babysit the five-year-old.

Before the show, I was sitting with the little boy and Steve in the booth. He was bored so I gave him a show program to look at. After very quickly informing me that he couldn’t read it I told him he could look at the pictures.

I know, I’m a really great babysitter.

So fast forward back to the end of intermission: my five-year-old buddy and I were still awaiting the winner. We had sold numerous chocolate bars. Where were they? We made an announcement over the PAC speaker system for everyone to check their wrappers very carefully.

Still nothing.

So my five-year-old buddy and I went to the next logical conclusion: it had been thrown away.

So there we were, digging through the trash where sure enough there it was: the gold in the garbage.

Since there was no way of knowing who had purchased the actual candy bar that won, I made an executive producer decision.

The five-year-old was going to be the winner.

As five year olds often do, he questioned my decision. I told him the rules stated whoever finds the golden ticket gets to go on stage. Since technically we had “found it” in the trash, one of us got to go on stage.

His mom thought it was very cute that he got to go on stage at the start of the second act.

The rest of opening weekend, we made sure to tell every single person who bought a chocolate bar to check carefully.

Now, remember how I said I was glad that chocolate bars were not going to be on my to-do list. Well, about that…

Our director ordered beautifully done Wonka Bars with an authentic Wonka wrapper. We ran out of those after three shows and we still had three shows left.

So during our two days off from production, I went to Costco and bought every box of hershey bars they had, made thousands of wonka wrapper photo copies at Fedex, and assembled a team of parents to help recreate the wonka bars for our second weekend of performances.

The night of our cast “brush-up rehearsal”, I was running a small sweatshop of parents at the back of the theater to get these bars done. We covered the hershey bar with a photocopied wrapper, tried our best to discreetly hide the masking tape, and put them in the boxes to sell.

Luckily, we did sell a lot of Wonka bars and a lot of candy during our six performance run. Even after Costco and Fedex expenses, we had a profit that added a decent amount of revenue to our final budget.

Plus no more golden tickets ended up in the garbage.