When your local theater company decides to put on their version of a Broadway play, how are the royalties decided?
If the show is done for charity, are the royalties waived?
It really depends. I don’t know if anyone here works for MTI or anything, and I’ve never done the actual budgeting for a show, but from what I understand, when you apply, you tell them:
How many shows you plan to do
How many seats you’re planning on selling, and for how much
What kind of organization is putting this on (school, charity, etc etc)
and they give you a quote…
Ah, in fact, check here.
Of course, MTI is not the only company that licenses shows, but they’re one of the biggest, and have a lot of big name shows.
If you’re looking for some rough ideas, I’m pretty sure that the large community theatre company I play for (one of the largest in the country) generally pays, for most of the shows it does, oh, geez… I don’t know really. Our budgets tend to be around 100,000, but about 40,000 of that is for rental of the theatre. That’s for a run of one weekend, six performances.
On the other hand, I do music direction at a high school whose entire drama budget is 10,000. Since I’ve been there we’ve done Little Shop of Horrors, Chicago, and Sweet Charity.
Also, I’ve done some work at the local university with student-run (mainly) productions. We did Bat Boy and Rocky Horror Picture Show, and both of those had miniscule budgets. Like, less than 2,000 I believe.
So, the moral is, it really depends on how much money you plan on making, and what for.
Also for musicals, the price will vary depending on how large an orchestra you’ll be using, since you’ll need music for each piece.
There may be a sliding scale for overall royalties, depending on whether you’re a community theater, regional, church group or high school.
Former employee of Samuel French here. You’ve received good answers so far… I’d be happy to give you more details, but you’ll have to be more specific. Is it a play or a musical you’re considering? And which one? Generally speaking, plays will run you anywhere from $20-100 per performance, while musicals might be in the $2000+ range depending on size of orchestra, what show it is, etc…
And no, it does not matter whether you charge for tickets, or if the event is for charity, the authors are always entitled to royalties.
How coincidental. I’m not actually going to put on a play, but am just curious about the costs.
Many moons ago I saw a local theater company do a very stripped down version of “They’re Playing Our Song”: very basic props and costumes. Music was provided by a pianist and drummer (turns out that I went to high school with him). I became a fan of the play and have collected a few bits and pieces related to it.
One of the items is a French’s Musical Library script. In the back of the script, there’s listings for other plays. For example, at the bottom of the listing for “The Odd Couple” is the line, "Royalty $50-$35).
What does that mean?
What that means is that it would cost you $50 for the first performance, and $35 for each subsequent performance. What you have there is old, however, because all of Neil Simon’s shows, including “The Odd Couple”, are now $75 per performance. And then of course that’s in addition to the cost of scripts, which are $6.25 each. All in all, a pretty cheap venture.
There’s no copyright date in the book, so I don’t how old it is. The play originally debuted in 1979 so, obviously, it can’t be any older than that.
I see. I guess using a full orchestra would get costly.
Methinks you are confused. What I meant was, the royalty price for “The Odd Couple” used to be $50-$35, but as all things do, has raised to the current price of $75 per performance. Just simple inflation; it’s still the same play.
Also, “The Odd Couple” is not a musical. Things change drastically when you go from straight plays to musicals. As I said before, you’re looking at thousands of dollars in rented scores and/or recordings, and has nothing to do with the $50-$35 or $75 that applies to a straight play such as “The Odd Couple”. It’s a whole different ballgame.
But you could easily find a straight play (as opposed to a musical) cheaper than Neil Simon… Anything written before 1923 is free, and anything between then and say, 1950 is usually 20 bucks a performance.
My bad, I was referring to “They’re Playing Our Song”.
As I said, the version I saw used just a piano and drums as opposed to a small orchestra.
In it the main character, Vernon, is a composer. The script calls for him to play the piano in certain scenes. Would this cost extra?
Oh okay. Well yes you can certainly perform a musical with just a “piano only” package, which is cheaper than renting the entire orchestral score. But I’m sorry, I’m not understanding what you mean “cost extra”? I mean, if you decide to perform the show, Samuel French (or whoever owns the show you choose) will send you the piano part. Then, your accompanist plays it while the actors sing. If the script calls for a certain actor to go to the piano and play a song, then that’s just the way it is… it’s not going to cost extra to you.
That’s what I meant. In the version I saw, the actor had supposedly recorded the piano bit earlier and was singing along to it when, actually, the pianist was playing offstage.
The venue was extremely small and it wouldn’t have been impossible to get a piano on the stage even if the actor could play it.
…wouldn’t have been POSSIBLE…, that is.
I see. Well I can’t speak for MTI or other companies, but I don’t think that would be a problem at SF. I mean, they wouldn’t be able to supply a recording or anything, you’d be on your own there, but I guess it would be difficult to find a great singer and actor who also played piano. So yeah you could just have the pianist play it, or make a recording for that one song, I guess.
Just as a point of reference, one of our local theatre companies did Jesus Christ, Superstar in 2003 and the royalties were ~$4,500. That was for six performances, and a house which had 750 seats.
I am certain that some years ago I read that Andrew Lloyd Weber was never in any rush to turn his works in to movies because he received between 10 and 15% of the ticket price for every performance of his works. He was making more from these royalties than he was ever offered for movie rights.
Composers of musicals receive “grand rights.” These are royalties that have to be paid for every use of your song. They are non-transferable and for people like Sir Andrew 10 to 20% of the ticket price. Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus are making more from “Mamma Mia” than they did in ABBA (and they had nothing to do with the show except the use of their songs).
Writing a successful musical is one way of getting very very rich.
I was surprised when I heard this considering ABBA sold over 300 million records (and are still selling).
And don’t forget about Chess!
Sadly, Chess has not been the money maker it should have been. Mamma Mia is a phenomenal hit, with 12 companies all over the world (and mroe planned).
ABBA made a lot of money, but artists and composers are only paid once for each record/CD sold. “Grand rights” are paid every time a song is performed, which is usually 8 times a week, sometimes for years. During Phantom’s heyday, Lloyd Webber was making $5,000 a day from the show! Nice work if you can get it.