Stage Directions Guide to Getting and Keeping Your Audience »

Neil Offen served as Editor of Stage Directions magazine for nearly five years, beginning in 1994. Neil brings to his work decades of journalistic experience and a lifelong love of theatre in all its facets.

Stephen Peithman is Editor-in-Chief of Stage Directions magazine, which he cofounded in 1988. Stephen brings to his work decades of journalistic experience and a lifelong love of theatre in all its facets.

Today, theatre competes with many forms of entertainment for people's leisure time. So how does a theatre attract and maintain the audience it needs? This book tells you how, providing essential information on advertising to motivate ticket-buyers, creating attention-getting mailings, using newsletters, numerous successful marketing and promotion tips, why audiences don't come, and much more.

Library Journal

Two under-appreciated theatrical specialties, technical production for the novice and audience development, take center stage in these two thorough works. With hundreds of production/design/technical credits behind him, Campbell has written what will certainly become a standard introductory text on technical theater. All facets of production are clearly explained in jargon-free prose, and unfamiliar terms are highlighted and defined in an appended glossary. In addition to separate chapters on the more traditional elements of technical theater (lights, sound, scenery, properties), Campbell gives equal weight to the venue, design, stage management, corporate theater, and checklists. As valuable as this comprehensive manual is for the neophyte, experienced techies will also benefit from its common sense. Everyone involved with theater should have acces to this most welcome text. Stage Directions, "the practical magazine of theater," is to the theater community what the U*N*A*B*A*S*H*E*D Librarian is to librarians. This guide to cultivating and retaining an audience, the most perplexing and financially significant problem facing every theater, is the latest entry in Heinemann's "Stage Directions" series, compiled mostly from previously published articles in the magazine. This practical compendium, arranged in three sections, addresses how to attract and retain a constituency and profiles several theaters that have been successful in both areas. A more focused and audience-specific work, this title will be of value to theater administrators and marketers as well as smaller theater groups seeking practical and empirically tested ideas and solutions.--Barry X. Miller, Austin P.L., TX Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.