A general manager in theater is a freelance chief operating officer who transforms a script into a full business, handling operations, finances, and staffing for productions that can generate up to $1 million a week. The role emerged in the 1960s-70s as producers stopped keeping permanent staff and needed independent managers to run shows on the ground.
What do you do for a living? What's a general manager anyways?
My current answer for that, because it's a question that comes up a lot, especially as new people get into producing, they say, well, why do I need a general manager? What do they do? We, for the commercial theatrical industry, we're freelance chief operating officers. So somebody wants to produce a show, they come to us and say, well, How do I make this script— and hopefully they have the money or the ability to raise it— how do I make it into a business? And that's what we do, is we craft the business aspects of producing a large commercial theatrical show. Because if you think about a Broadway show, say you can gross $1 million a week, and you do. Well, all of a sudden, like, in the course of a short period of time, you know, anywhere from a year to a couple years, you're building a small business that has revenues of $52 million a year, you know, and has dozens of employees, if not 100 employees. And so how do you move from I've got a script and some money to that? And that's what we develop and implement for producers.
We're like line producers for theater similar to what a line producer would do for film and television. And in days gone by, even before my time, in the '50s, the '40s, the '30s, there were established producers that maintained their own offices, and they would do show after show after show. And usually management was in-house, and they didn't necessarily have fancy titles. You know, sometimes they were just called managers, sometimes company managers, sometimes general manager. But they were, you know, in the days of the Kermit Bloomgartens and of that of that ilk that regularly produced, they had somebody in-house dealing with this. Then as it transitioned to '60s, '70s, there were less and less of those individuals that could maintain, and there became independent producers that were in and out of the business. So general managers started to establish that they were kind of the mainstay. They were on the street. They had the office. They were there all the time. So people that may do one show a year or one show every 2 or 3 years, or people that couple up and they co-produce with another individual or group of individuals, they source out what is our foundation, who is going to handle this show.
