How much does it cost?

While exploring the hindrances schools face with theatrical productions the main thing that came to mind is money. Given the fact that most shows schools want to do are often student versions I decided to look at one of the major theatre licensing companies like Music Theatre International (MTI for short) to see if a school version of certain musicals would cost less than regular version.

So on MTI there is a slight problem that it will not show me the prices without being a registered member. However it did bring up some interesting facts I had not thought about going into this topic beforehand. MTI provides an itemized list at the bottom of their page on the materials provided and recommendations on cast size. Due to the lack of information provided by the website I interviewed a local director at the Harrington Arts Academy in Northern Colorado, Brittany Harrington was the director of several productions at this academy her list of shows includes The Butler Did It, Rent, Godspell, and Into the Woods, since the shows are so different I was offered a range of what these usually cost to produce. All of the scripts except the one for Butler were rented from MTI the total rights had cost anywhere from $3,000-$5,000, when I asked what that total cost was for it broke down to rental of the librettos was a majority of the cost, however past that even the direct wasn't sure. This makes me wonder where does the rest of the cost comes from and how do they make up for the rest of those thousands of dollars.

While browsing through some sources I came across Copyright Crash Course the information they had provided broke down how a show makes its money back for the theatre. The items it looks into are the title of the show, location of the performance, if there is a producing organization involved, seating capacity, ticket pricing, is this for a non-profit or a profit group, number of performances, and performance dates. All of these things put into consideration from MTI and Copyright Crash Course I believe that the reason a school is willing to shell out the amount to get the rights for a show is because of the factors in copyright crash course usually focusing on medium priced tickets and large seating capacity to make back the money on rights within a shorter performance time.


For example this cast of Godspell, which incorporated middle school, high school, and some college aged students, ran for 3 weekends charging $12-$15 per ticket with 8 showings with an audience of roughly 70 audience members per night, this show over its run made roughly $8,400 before expenses were considered.