Andy Sandberg juggles writing, directing, producing, and acting by building a specialized team around him. He works closely with a music director to adjust tempo for narrative energy and collaborates with choreographers on staging, arguing that shared prep sessions create better storytelling than isolated workflows.
Chapters
You got into producing Trial by Fire, and you write, you direct, you produce, you act. Yeah. Am I leaving anything out? Uh, no, I think as of now I think that's it. Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, when you do any of those things, you have to dabble in a little bit of everything else. But, uh, no, I'm fortunate to work with good collaborators in all the other hats, and, and I'm rarely wearing that many hats at once. There are projects where I will wear a couple hats that overlap. Talk a little bit about that, how you then surround yourself with a team to make you the best that you can be. Especially if I'm doubling up on the creative and the management, if I'm directing and producing, for example, I have to make sure, you know, I'm covered with a strong general manager. As a director, I want to have a strong assistant and wonderful designers to work with. You know, if it's a musical, I need to know I have a strong choreographer and music a music director that I can trust, and not just to do their job. I mean, to me, any good collaboration involves being able to go to a musical director and saying, "This scene isn't working. What's going on here? And here's my thoughts, but could it be this?" And hearing their input in the same way that I would want to feel comfortable going to them and saying, "Can we play with the tempo of this? I know it's the music department, but as the director, I feel like the tempo is messing with the energy of this." You know, the best collaborative experiences I've had with choreographers when I'm directing are the ones where we're working on the stage pictures together. Where it's, you know, there are some directors and choreographers who really like to isolate their work, and for some that works well. They do choreography in the morning, director comes in and does his work, vice versa. But I tend to like to be very involved in the musical staging and working with the choreographer trying to create together, doing prep sessions together, watching what's happening, not to, not to step on each other's toes, but really so we understand where it's coming from, because it's all about telling a story.
