Are ‘Company’s that Care’ Really a Dying Breed?

Business people we ain’t. There is very little chance that Alan Sugar will be beating down the door and begging us to join his dynamic team, and Duncan Bannetyne and the rest of the den have little to fear. We have had to learn new skills and embrace a new world through LUCKY BUCKET PRODUCTIONS but we started our little venture out of a genuine desire to help. Two little lost creatives in a world of marketing, advertising , social media and databases. It is important to know that the shows for theatre groups on a budget, the plays for stressed out teachers and the album for navigating parenting were created out of necessity and we thought it best to share them with teachers and parents – like us.

Time after time we have been told (by loving supporters of our work) that we are ‘too cheap’, and reminded that people believe in ‘getting what they pay for’ and ‘if it looks too good to be true it probably is’. Yuck. I don’t believe for one minute that we are the only company in the World seeking to provide a genuine service at fair prices.

Why? Because I ran my own theatre school for 7 years and in that time every Tom, Dick, Samuel French and Josef Weinberger managed to skip off with a nice fat cheque in their hand and I was left reeling from each and every show we staged. Lighting designers, bands, microphone hire, batteries, make-up, costume, props, set hire, licensing companies….the list goes on and on and I am still too traumatised to go into it all again. So there was I, with hundreds of eager pupils all wanting to take part in fab productions, and I just could not see how to make it less financially stressful. I even applied for lottery funding for my school (which kept countless kids off the streets and channelled their enormous energy into creative pursuits). After mountains of paperwork and form filling the response from the lottery people?

Charge more.

Charge more?! The parents were already paying class fees and production fees but the little nugget of wisdom from lottery funding was: charge more. Genius, why didn’t I think of that?

Maybe, just maybe everyone else should charge less?! Now, I write stuff and the stuff I write takes time and energy, it means something to me and every time someone compliments my writing they validate my existence and if anyone dared to criticise it then I would have to change my name and crawl under a rock. I don’t take criticism well. I am all for fair pay for writers and fair pay for musicians but some licensing companies are taking the proverbial.

Do they really expect schools and theatre groups to be able to find the huge sums of money they demand – on top of everything else that needs paying? Theatre companies around this neck of the woods are disappearing altogether. Theatre hire and costs of staging shows are forcing them to fold. Now that might be music to the ears of amdram haters but let me tell you – I spent many an hour in rehearsals as a youngster and if I was not in that village hall giving it bigtime jazz hands then who knows what I would have been up to? So, ‘thank you’ musical theatre (my hometown thanks you too).

So we must keep creating opportunities for young people to ‘find themselves’ through performing arts and we must support each other as we do this. So I hope people can understand why we are reasonably priced, why we exist in the first place and that fair pricing does not mean a compromise on quality. There is no need to keep lining the pockets of Andrew Lloyd-Webber…have you seen the size of his gaff? Open your hearts and minds to the possibility that not EVERYBODY is out to rip you off, SOME people actually want to help you on your journey. Imagine that.