Mauckingbird Theater Company

Unlike some of Philadelphia’s older, more established theaters, The Mauckingbird Theater Company bases their decision to continue producing on a show-by-show basis.

“We operate on such a tight budget margin that one flop would seriously impact our decision to do another show,” said Lindsay Mauck, Managing Director and co-founder of Mauckingbird, which was named Philadelphia’s Best Gay Theater Company by Philadelphia Weekly in 2011.

Perhaps to demonstrate just how tight the budget is, Mauck does everything from running the company’s website to contracting actors to managing the payroll all on her own time. She does not make any money from the company and works as the managing director in between her other paying jobs.

Walnut Street Theater

Ralph Weeks sits at a cluttered desk on the third floor of America’s oldest theater, The Walnut Street Theater, stuffing envelopes and printing brochures. This is just a normal day for the theater’s Director of Marketing and Public Relations, whose job has certainly changed in the last few years.

“We’re becoming a search-driven society,” said Weeks. “People have to look for things rather than turning the page of a newspaper. So it becomes much harder to people to find out or discover new things.”

While the 203-year-old theater is active on social media, with a Facebook page and Twitter account, Weeks stresses that he does not rely on those ways of communication.

“We make sure to focus on things that work rather than things that are fun,” he said. “An email blast works for us because it reaches the demographic of the theater-goer more effectively than Twitter does. Twitter would probably reach a younger clientele and the normal ticket buyer in any theater in town is probably a little older. So you want to communicate in the way that they communicate, not in the way that you communicate.”