The Theater Management Handbook

Rating:
Summary: Misleading - but useful.
Review: When I saw the publisher's comment "Before the curtain rises ...careful attention to planning, budgeting and scheduling must be overseen" I thought I had found a book that would help me in my task of setting up a budget and developing a stratigic or at least a single project plan for a new theater company. Wrong. While there are useful forms for scheduling certain tasks as well as some accounting forms, neither the Index or the Table of Contents mention planning or budgeting. This book seems to assume that planning and budgeting have already taken place. For this reason, I was rather disappointed in the content and felt misled by the publisher's comment.

Having said the above, however, I do believe the forms are well put together and will save the weeks of work it would take to design them, and even more time lost if they were not available. This book is really about day-to-day operations and not about the broader tasks of management. I believe if the book had been titled "Theater Office Forms and Guidelines" or "The Administration of Theater Operations", I would still have purchased it and would not have been disappointed in the content.