There is a moment when a developing play officially becomes a production.
A theater is booked. Contracts are signed. Designers are hired. Rehearsal dates go onto the calendar. Suddenly, the project begins to look real to everyone outside the room.
But that is not where the production began.
A show does not suddenly become “a production.” Production readiness is created over time—through rewrites, readings, difficult conversations, artistic decisions, relationships, and the steady work of figuring out what the play is trying to become.
That work is development.
And development is not separate from production.
Production is the result of development.
As a creative producer, my job is not simply to find a script I like, raise money, hire a team, and put it onstage.
My job begins much earlier.
It begins with helping a talented writer understand what is already alive inside the work, what is not yet fully communicating, and what the play will require in order to live and breathe in a room—and eventually in front of an audience.
That requires producing experience.
It also requires dramaturgy.
Believing in a Play Is Only the Beginning
Every new production begins with belief.
Someone has to recognize the potential in a script before the work is fully visible to everyone else. Someone has to believe that the writer’s voice matters, that the story belongs onstage, and that the project is worth the years of effort it may take to get there.
But believing in a show is not the same as determining that it is ready to produce. That second decision demands much harder questions.
Does the play sustain its dramatic tension from beginning to end?
Are the characters sufficiently distinct?
Do their relationships deepen and change?
Does each scene accomplish something necessary?
Do the act endings land with enough force?
Is the theatrical language of the piece clear?
Can the central ideas be translated into physical choices onstage?
And do we understand the experience we are asking the audience to have?
The Work Before the Workshop
Two weeks ago, playwright Debbie Goodstein and I brought The Blue Violinist Over West End Avenue into a table-reading workshop as we continued preparing for its Off-Broadway production.
We had already worked intensely to get the script ready for that room.
Debbie had been rewriting. We had been discussing structure, character, tone, politics, family, faith, assimilation, surrealism, and the theatrical world of the play. We had made significant decisions, tested ideas, discarded others, and continued asking what the play needed.
That work mattered because a table reading is only as useful as the questions you bring into it.
The goal was not simply to hear actors read the play.
It was to hear what the script was doing.
There is an important difference.
When actors embody the characters, the play begins to produce information that is difficult to access on the page. You hear where energy rises and falls. You hear when characters occupy the same tonal territory. You hear when a scene turns too late—or does not turn at all.
You stop evaluating the sequence of scenes and begin experiencing the dramatic organism as a whole.
That is where dramaturgical skill becomes practical. You listen not only for whether something is “good,” but for what function it is serving, what pressure it is creating, and how it affects everything around it.
What the Room Revealed
The workshop allowed us to hear more clearly what each character needed to contribute to the larger dramatic structure.
Some characters needed to become more distinct from one another. Others needed to complement or challenge each other more effectively. In certain scenes, one character’s tone needed to be dialed down so that another character—and another part of the story—could come forward.
That does not necessarily mean cutting the strongest personality in the room. It means understanding the balance of the scene.
Who is carrying the dramatic action?
Whose perspective has not yet been heard? When can they speak up?
Are two characters creating useful tension, or are they simply repeating the same emotional note?
These are not abstract questions. They affect how the audience receives the play moment by moment.
We also looked carefully at all of the “buttons” at the end of each scene: the final line, image, revelation, or action that allows the scene to land and propels the audience into what comes next. By hearing the scenes in sequence, we understood what each one needed to accomplish before the next scene pushed more of the story forward.
The workshop also revealed that two scenes could be combined. On the page, they had appeared to serve separate purposes. In performance, we could hear that they were covering some of the same dramatic ground. Combining and editing them make the storytelling more concentrated. It will allow the scene to raise the stakes and give the play greater momentum.
Most importantly, we were able to experience the power of the end of Act One.
That ending had previously lacked the force the story demanded. The material was there, but the dramatic architecture hadn’t yet fully revealed it.
Debbie and I had worked and re-worked that scene many, many times, and it finally felt right enough for us to move it into the reading. We needed to hear it.
And hearing it out loud—she nailed it. It was magical.
I literally cried at the end of Act One. The moment landed with a resonance and emotional force that had not been there before. Everything we had been working toward—the pressure among the characters, the accumulating conflict, the deeper questions underneath the play—suddenly came together. All that work for that one moment at the end of Act One.
For the first time, I was not listening as a dramaturg/producer evaluating the structure. I was receiving it as an audience member.
That is the moment we all hope for in development: not merely recognizing that a problem has been solved, but feeling the play come fully alive in the room.
And once the play begins to live that fully in performance, the next questions change.
The work is no longer only about what is on the page. It becomes about how those discoveries will take physical form onstage—and how they will be communicated to an audience.
What Changes When Production Begins
As we move from development into production, the questions expand.
The script remains central, but it is no longer the only consideration.
Now we must begin asking how the work will exist physically onstage.
How will the actors move through the space?
What visual world supports the story? What will the set look like?
How does the production communicate realism, memory, ritual, and surrealism?
How will the blue violinist live inside the theatrical language of the play?
How do we evoke the Upper West Side as a modern shtetl?
How do we dramatize the comfort of assimilation and its cost?
And how do we accomplish all of that within the realities of an Off-Broadway budget?
Wow. These are all producing questions, design questions, and dramaturgical questions, all at the same time.
Here’s the thing: a theatrical concept cannot remain an idea that only the writer, director, and producer understand.
It has to become visible. It has to become playable.
It has to speak to an audience that has not been inside our development conversations.
In August, we are moving more deeply into production design. We will begin translating the concepts we have spent so much time discussing into scenery, sound, lighting, costumes, movement, and space.
This is not the point where development ends, though.
It is where development takes physical form.
Artistic Vision Has to Meet Reality
Creative producing requires holding two truths at once: the artistic ambition must remain strong, but the production must remain possible.
A concept may be compelling, but can it be built? Can it function through the transitions of the play? Can the actors use it safely and fluidly? Can it be lit?
Does it deepen the storytelling—or merely decorate it?
And is it worth what it will cost?
A budget is not an unfortunate administrative matter that exists outside the art. A budget clarifies the art.
When resources are limited, the creative team has to determine which choices are essential to the audience’s experience and which are not. We are deciding those elements now, this week.
That discipline can be frustrating, but it can also make the work more theatrical. More imaginative.
The stage doesn’t need to reproduce reality literally. It needs instead to create a world in which the audience can believe, feel welcomed into, and then, hopefuly, be continually amazed by.
My job as a creative producer is to help the team locate the choices that carry the greatest dramatic meaning over to the audience, and then to help to make those choices possible in concrete terms. That is, in budget terms.
Fun, fun, fun.
That is where artistic leadership meets practical leadership.
But then, that’s the work.
Production Readiness Is Built
A show becomes ready through accumulation.
One rewrite clarifies a relationship. One workshop reveals a structural imbalance. One actor exposes a tonal problem. One conversation opens a new thematic possibility. One design meeting turns an abstract idea into a stage image. One budget decision forces the team to identify what matters most and how to make it come alive, within our resources.
Production readiness is not “perfection.” It is not the moment when the script can no longer change. It will change up to opening night.
It must change. That’s the process of development.
Debbie and I did not arrive at this production because the play was simply selected and placed onto a stage.
We arrived here by returning to the work. Over and over again.
By listening carefully. By asking difficult questions. By Debbie’s willingness to revisit the stories of Sholom Aleichem’s Tevye—the inspiration for this play—for what may truly have been the millionth time, and still remaining open to discovering something new.
We arrived here through my protecting the writer’s voice while also challenging the script to become more specific, more theatrical, and more powerful.
And we arrived here by understanding that the path from development to production is not a clean dividing line.
HA! Nothing even close.
It is one continuous artistic process. One question that, resolved, follows with another.
Because this art, this story, this concept, is worth it. The audiences are worth it.
This is the work of the creative producer: to recognize what might be possible before it is fully visible.
To bring the right people into the room, and then give them the resources to do their best.
To use a dramaturgical skill set to understand what the work needs—and what it does not.
To help the writer strengthen what is on the page, then listen as actors, directors, and designers begin translating those discoveries into performance, movement, sound, light, and space.
And finally, to help the play—this beautiful vision of Debbie’s that I believed in from the very beginning—take shape onstage in front of an audience.
And then – to watch their reaction as they experience the magic of telling stories on stage.
Production does not begin when the curtain rises.
It begins when someone takes a script seriously enough to stick with it. To question it. To protect it. To challenge it. To help it become fully theatrical.
But eventually, all of that work must meet an audience.
At the end of October, The Blue Violinist Over West End Avenue by Debbie Goodstein will leave our development rooms and step onto an Off-Broadway stage. The play we have questioned, shaped, heard aloud, taken apart, and put back together will begin its next life in front of the people it was written for.
The tickets are not yet on sale. The website is still being built. Our designers are only beginning to turn a year’s worth of conversations and discoveries into a physical world.
But the production has already begun.
Over the coming months, I will be sharing more of that journey: the choices, the challenges, the discoveries, and the process of turning a script into a living theatrical event.
And when the doors finally open, I hope you will be there—not simply to see the finished production, but to encounter the work that all of us have been working, for so hard and for so long, to fully bring this story to life.
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