Planning a Production From Five Numbers
A production plan can be sketched in an evening from five figures, and having them early changes decisions that are expensive to change later.
1. Will it fit the slot?
Start with the running time. The script runtime calculator at a page a minute puts 120 pages with one interval at 2 h 15; at a 1.15 pace multiplier it becomes 2 h 33.
That decides whether the script suits your slot, whether it needs an interval, and what time the audience leaves — which the venue will want to know before it wants anything else.
2. How much rehearsal actually exists?
The rehearsal scheduler on six weeks, three rehearsals a week, three hours each, with four reserved for tech and dress: 18 rehearsals, 54 hours, of which 42 hours are scene work.
Divided by scene weight, a 15-page scene gets 14 hours and an 8-page scene gets 7.47. Those numbers are worth arguing with in week one, when the argument can still change the schedule.
3. Can the audience see it?
If you are building seating, the sightline calculator gives the riser progression — and the important finding is that risers are not uniform. Eight rows starting 12 ft out at 3 ft pitch need 1.359 ft, then 1.426, then 1.481. Uniform risers lose the back rows.
Structure, load rating and edge protection are separate matters entirely, for a competent person and the venue's rules.
4. Where is everyone standing?
The blocking grid turns a 30 by 20 ft stage into a 15 by 10 grid of 150 addressable cells, so blocking is recorded as coordinates rather than as descriptions that stop meaning anything when the set changes.
5. What will it cost?
The prop budget planner on a modest list: £159 subtotal, 15% contingency, £182.85 total. The percentage column usually finds the surprise — twenty books at £2 being a quarter of the budget while everyone discusses the telephone.
Putting them in order
The sequence matters, because each answer constrains the next. Running time decides whether the script is viable at all. Rehearsal hours decide whether the staging ambition is realistic. Sightlines decide the seating build. Blocking notation and budget follow from those.
Companies that start at the budget end up rescheduling; companies that start at the running time rarely do.
And what none of it covers
These are planning figures. They say nothing about whether a scene works, whether a picture reads from the back, or whether the show is any good — and nothing at all about safety. Electrical work, working at height, rigging, seating structures, haze and anything involving flame are matters for competent people and for the venue's own requirements, and they are worth reading about before the first build call rather than after it.
When to recompute
These figures are settled early and should be revisited at two points. After the first read-through, replace the assumed pace multiplier with a measured one from the actual timing — that is when the running time becomes real. And after casting and availability are known, redo the rehearsal split, because availability usually changes which scenes are constrained more than page count does.
Beyond those two, leave them alone. A plan recomputed weekly is a plan nobody trusts.
Write them on one page
The whole set fits on a single sheet: running time and interval, usable rehearsal hours and the per-scene split, riser heights if you are building, grid dimensions, and the props total with contingency.
Pinned in the rehearsal room, that page answers most of the questions a production generates in its first month — and answering them from a shared sheet rather than from memory is most of what keeps a volunteer company aligned.
The value is in doing it early
None of this arithmetic is difficult, and all of it is cheap in week one and expensive in week five. A company that discovers in the technical rehearsal that the show runs twenty minutes long, the back row cannot see, and the props budget is spent has not had bad luck — it has had five questions it never asked.