Tip: you can listen while you read along, or close your screen and treat it as a podcast on the drive home.
Why this is Module 1. Before any schedule, risk matrix or budget, there's one shift you have to make: you are no longer just teaching a class — you are running a temporary production organisation, with a deadline that does not move, a machine most schools can't see, and a duty of care you can't put down. This module is the lens; the rest of Tier 1A (scheduling, risk, compliance, budget) are the tools you'll pick up once you're standing in the right place.
What you'll walk away with. An honest picture of the machine you're now in charge of, your real job inside it, and the two decisions that quietly determine whether the whole production is sane or a slow-motion disaster: what show you choose, and what you refuse to carry alone.
Fair question. Here's the short version, because it changes how you should weigh everything that follows.
I got my first paid show at eleven — on a follow-spot in the dome room of the Victoria Theatre in Singapore, standing on two milk crates to see out the window, weighting the lamp with bricks to counterbalance it. Four shows, eighty dollars cash, and I knew that was the career. I registered my company, Gosling Productions, at fifteen (the man at the registry office had to stand up and look out the window to check there was actually someone that small there to register an ABN). Since then it's been twenty-one years across every corner of this work: lighting, sound, rigging, stage and production management, freight and touring, set and scenic, projection and media servers, front of house, festivals, corporate, circus, dance, opera, TV — international tours through to a school hall. I've designed it, operated it, managed it, taught it, and loaded the truck for it.
I tell you that not to impress you, but because of a problem this course exists to fix: our industry hoards knowledge. Everyone's casual, everyone's worried about the next gig, so the 50- and 60-year-old operators won't train the next generation in case it costs them a paycheck. So you get "experts" who are two years out of uni and certain they know everything. This isn't that. This is two decades, deliberately handed over, so you don't have to learn it the hard way like I did.
The single biggest thing schools — and especially business managers — get wrong is believing a production is "just fun and laughter." It isn't. It's a machine, and it's expensive.
Put a show on a modest 12×6 stage with a fly tower and, once you've actually paid for lighting, sound, set, audio, orchestra, costumes and labour, you are easily into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. (For context: an entry-level opera at an external venue can spend a million.) The cost nobody allocates for is people — and in 2026 people are the biggest line of all. More on the numbers in the Budget module; for now, just hold the shape of it.
And here's the part that should sit uncomfortably: creative roles with thirty years of experience — choreographers, musical directors — routinely get offered three, four, five thousand dollars for an entire show. That's not just insulting to a career; it tells you the school has no idea what it's actually asking for. Part of your job as the production manager is to make this invisible machine visible to the people holding the purse strings — before they commit you to something that can't be built for the money.
There's a huge spread among the teachers who get handed a show, and it's worth locating yourself honestly on it.
Some have run productions for twenty years — they know the cycle, the methodology, how to budget, how to use their space. Some haven't looked at lighting or sound since the one unit they did at university fifteen years ago. And plenty are the primary music or drama teacher who has a cupboard full of microphones and cables and no idea what they're called or how to plug them in — all the passion in the world, none of the skill yet. (That's literally my own son's drama teacher: brilliant, passionate, and the gear may as well be ornamental.)
Passion is a fantastic starting point. As I always say: you can't teach a personality, but you can teach a skill. If you come in with the right mindset — open, willing to learn — I can give you every tool and skill you need to do this properly. If you come in certain you already know everything, this'll be hard, and honestly it might not be for you, and that's okay too. It's professional development: if you take one thing away, it's done its job.
This is Tier 1A: the frameworks — the production-manager's chair, the schedule, the risk register, the compliance stack and the budget. It teaches you how to run a show and how to read what you're being sold, without drowning you in technical jargon.
The vocabulary half comes next, in Tier 1B: Speak Lighting, Speak Sound, Speak Stage Management, and reading a lighting plot / sound spec — the technical depth that lets you challenge an over-spec'd quote line-by-line. So when 1A points at a term and says "the detail's in 1B", that's why: 1A makes you unbullshittable on the process; 1B makes you unbullshittable on the kit.
Strip it back and the production manager's job is to manage: crew, staff, budget, and — the hardest of all — expectations on a small budget. That last one is the whole game.
Which leads to the most important boundary you'll set. The school will be tempted to say: "We don't have any money, Jane — we're really sorry, but you'll need to be the director, and the choreographer, and run the sound, and teach all the kids singing." If that's genuinely the mission you want to take on, fine — but go in with your eyes open to its size, and in most cases you need to push back, calmly, and say: "I'm going to need some help — this is several full jobs, not one." Don't fall into the trap of carrying the whole machine on your own because nobody told you that you could ask.
That doesn't mean being difficult. It means understanding the org chart of a production — director, musical director/conductor, choreographer, stage manager, crew heads, parent volunteers — and where you sit in it. You're the one keeping the temporary organisation running; you are not obligated to also be every department in it.
Here's where being a teacher and being a production manager collide. In most schools — I'd say 95% of the time — the drama teacher who loves putting on shows is the person told to put on the concert, the musical, the show, often several a year. And here's the part that gets buried: putting on the musical doesn't stop your teaching load. You've still got your classes during the day — your Year 7s through 12s, your monologues and Greek theatre and improvisation — and the production sits on top of all of it. The unpaid, unacknowledged overtime that goes into a school show is genuinely intense, and almost nobody outside the theatre sees it.
Then it compounds, because being asked to "do the production" usually means wearing the director hat as well. So now you're being creative and trying to production-manage at the same time — and those are different jobs. A production manager isn't a creative role; it's creative in a technical sense, but its job is to make sure that everything above, around, behind and below the stage is safe and runs, not to decide what happens on it. Try to be both and you end up a one-person band — director, choreographer, sound, singing teacher, costume coordinator, budget holder — doing every fitting, organising every costume, dealing with the principal, all of it.
Some schools formalise a halfway version — a "production manager / director" role split fifty-fifty, half teaching load and half production. Honestly, even that's too much, because you're still directing on top of the split. Wherever you can separate the roles, separate them. Where you genuinely can't — because there isn't the staff or the money, and sometimes there just isn't — go in with your eyes open to the size of it, and delegate every task that doesn't legally need you. Anything involving money has to route through you in a school. But sourcing costumes, running the fittings check, pre-show checks, calling the show — a senior student or a parent volunteer can carry a lot of that. You don't have to hold all of it just because nobody told you that you could put some of it down.
The single best thing you can do to get out of the one-person-band trap is engage a stage manager — and understand the authority shift that comes with it, because it surprises people. In the professional world, the moment everyone walks into the theatre, the stage belongs to the stage manager. The director can give notes and artistic changes, but the SM is in charge of the day's operation on the floor — and in that sense the SM trumps the director while the show is running.
The way the day splits is the useful bit to copy. The production manager owns the run-up to call time and the crew work — the bump-in, the installs, the hazards, the fixing. The moment cast or creatives are in the room, the stage manager takes over: they call the breaks, the start times, "cast to stage", they run the cues, they run the day. While the performers are performing, that's the SM's territory — which, conveniently, becomes the PM's admin time to catch up on everything else.
Most teachers assume "over budget" means "not enough money". Just as often, the money's there — it's being spent on the wrong thing at the wrong time. A real example from a recent production I worked on (I'll keep names out of it):
The production manager had rostered three fly crew — one per fly line — for three scenic elements that flew on three separate lines. In an early meeting I asked the obvious question: do these three things all fly in at the same moment? Because if they do, three operators is right. But if the cues are staggered, one operator can pull in the first line, move up the fly rail, pull the second, move again, pull the third — same effect, two fewer wages. I was told no, they all go at once. As it turned out, across the entire run the flies never once came in together — the way the cues and the cast positions worked, it had to be staggered anyway. So two crew members' wages, every show, were pure waste.
Worse was the lighting. The director sat with the lighting designer for fourteen hours plotting the show — good. But for the two following tech rehearsals, the PM rostered a student to operate the lights, when what was actually needed was a lighting programmer — someone who could update the cues as the director re-blocked. The student could press "go" but couldn't program cue numbers on the console. So a three-hour tech rehearsal for Act One produced zero updates — three hours, nothing changed. The audio operator wasn't booked for those rehearsals at all, so the room full of paid-for sound gear sat unused while the kids needed it to hear their changes.
One hard note, because it comes up: the person holding the budget — sometimes the director — can get defensive when you point this out. "It's my responsibility to manage the budget and I feel I've made the right decision." You're not there to win the argument; you're there to make the machine visible. Raise it calmly, in private where you can, show the trade-off in numbers, and let the schedule and the dollar figures do the persuading. Some people will hear it; some won't. Your job is to have said it, on the record, before the money's gone.
This is where productions are won or lost, long before bump-in. Before you fall in love with a title, run it through these gates.
You might walk in wanting to do Wicked — but if you've got two strong male actors, a group of Year 11 dancers, and nobody who can sing Glinda or Elphaba, it is the wrong show. Choose for the people you actually have, not the cast you wish you had.
This is a serious consideration, not a box-tick. A real example: a school in a conservative Orthodox Jewish area staged Chicago — fishnet stockings, high-cut leotards, body rolls and drops, performed largely by girls from that community. The public outcry and the volume of complaints were enormous, and it overshadowed the entire production. Think hard about the show, the community, the climate, and how you stage it.
Get sign-off from whoever holds it — board, council, principal — early. A show vetoed after you've cast it is a catastrophe you can avoid with one conversation up front.
You need legal permission to perform most shows, from rights holders like Music Theatre International (MTI) or the Disney catalogue (the Frozen, Finding Nemo, Mary Poppins, Wicked, Legally Blonde juniors and seniors). The rights don't just cost money — they come with strict terms you may not expect:
And flexibility varies by holder: a locally-licensed Wizard of Oz might let you make changes; MTI's Oliver almost certainly won't. Read the terms before you commit, and budget the rights as a real line item.
You will have to say no — to a director's scope creep, to an effect you can't run safely, to a timeline that can't be built. The skill is in how:
You can say no — but never combatively, and never empty. A "no" must come with a solution, or at the very least an honest discussion of why and what's possible instead.
"No, and here's what we can do" keeps the relationship and the show intact. A bare "no" — or a "yes" you can't deliver — breaks both.
The reason this can't be a paint-by-numbers course is that no two schools are the same. You might be at a school like the one I'm at now — a full theatre with fly towers, front-of-house bridges, a mechanical orchestra pit, dressing rooms, a black-box space (genuinely rare resources). Or you might have a stage at the end of a gym with a single lighting bar. Or a fixed-grid theatre. Or no space at all, hiring an external venue.
So everything that follows runs on sliding scales — of time, of schedule, of resources, of money. The job of this course isn't to hand you one rigid process; it's to give you the judgement to navigate the scale you're actually on. Wherever you sit, the principles hold; the size of the dials changes.
Tier 1A · Module 1 · production-management templates — open in a new tab, print or save as PDF.