Theater Program Notes Generator

Generates detailed and engaging theater program notes

AI Results

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Frequently asked questions

About Theater Program Notes Generator

Whether you represent a community theater or a massive Broadway production, one hurdle you’ll likely face is creating accurate and captivating theater program notes. That's when Stackbear's Theater Program Notes Generator comes to the rescue: Just provide the title of the show, the main characters, and a brief summary of the plot, and using a huge amount of data on classic and contemporary theater, the tool will generate extensive and compelling background information.

The Challenge

Just like a book's jacket summary or a movie's IMDb page, theater program notes serve two purposes: They inform and engage the audience. A theatergoer who knows about the characters' motivations, the play's historical impact, and the larger themes you're exploring will likely better appreciate the performance.

However, creating such a backstory often involves an intense amount of research. And to grab someone's attention and convince them to read an entire page of information? It has to be exciting.

And that's precisely what Stackbear's Theater Program Notes Generator provides.

The Solution

When you provide the tool with the show information and run the generator, it produces an in-depth program profile that's hundreds of words long, with different versions to address different types of shows (musical vs. play, classic vs. contemporary.) You can use past tense or present tense, and it's available in different writing styles to account for factors such as the appreciate age of the audience or the formality of the event.

Some reports even come with images or etchings (hand-drawn by a machine learning algorithm).

You can include as much information as you'd like (the tool can handle up to 300 characters of freeform text), but its algorithm will use its predefined data to grab, in its own words, "the most important stuff."

What the reviewer says

"PJ Meacham, a writer, director and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University of Florida, uses the tool to write program notes for a theatre company in Tampa.

"PJ does it because research can take up a lot of her time during the rehearsal process that is better spent with the actors and the set," Meghan Bartley, the director of Stackbear, told us. When PJ begins pulling notes together, she turns to the tool as a starting point.

"She's typically using two, and sometimes three generations of Stackbear program notes that she'll then edit together to create her own programming note," Bartley said.

PJ says the tool shaves off 20 minutes (at least) of her writing time, and over an hour when all's said and done.

"I would highly recommend using it." "I feel like I have a lot more time with the actors and the team and to be present while I'm directing as opposed to glued to my computer researching."

How the free tool helps theatergoers and professionals

By writing program notes at the drop of a playbill, the tool also democratises theater and program note access, especially for the hearing impaired.

"Some of our best customers have been people who are hearing impaired, because now everybody should have the same opportunity to enjoy the theatre, to enjoy these notes, to enjoy the research process and the history," Bartley said. "We have a customer who uses our notes with her ESL students because they can see how to dissect a show after the fact."

And with each new library the tool learns from, more people can take advantage of this.

Why the tool shouldn't replace program full-time notetakers

Many thinkpieces have explored AI's role in taking creative jobs, begging one to ask if a theater program foretells of underpaid or unemployed theater scholars and writers. Don't worry, human program note writer. The tool currently wouldn't put you out of work.

This free tool, at first, was built by business consulting firm Stackbear as a way to flex its technical muscles ahead of launching something to a fee. After all, co-founders Bartley, Greg Kittredge, and Eric Madrick hadn't worked on practical projects together, and this tool meant they were ready to bring something, and hopefully some money, to the market.

And while gaining some experience on jobs like PJ's, the trio wants to work with theater professionals to automate the note-taking process fully.

"We're currently working with unions and subject matter experts in the field to build a solution to fully and accurately automate [program note writing]," Bartley said. "To build a tool that lets you write your own notes with Stackbear's magic behind the scenes."


In theaters before

Netflix series The Queen's Gambit releases nine episode headings and summaries from the first episode that read as existential poetry when combined. Beyond its uses, it makes eloquent program notes.

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