Programming the Evening
Anatomy of a Revue, Part 1: The Director's First Job
Before the lights are hung. Before the cast is called. Before a single costume is sketched or a single note is played. The director of a revue sits alone with a blank piece of paper and answers the only question that matters:
What goes where, and why?
This is programming. It is the most important thing the director does, and it is the thing nobody teaches, because nobody thinks it can be taught. I intend to prove otherwise.
The Problem Only the Revue Has
A book musical has a script. The playwright has already solved the problem of sequence — scene follows scene, song follows scene, the story carries the audience from overture to curtain call. The director's job is to realize the script, not to invent the order of the evening.
A revue has no script. It has material — songs, sketches, dances, specialty acts — and that material must be assembled into an evening that breathes. The sequence is not given. The sequence is everything. Put the wrong number in the wrong slot and the audience goes cold. Put the right number in the right slot and the audience doesn't just enjoy it — they feel it was inevitable, as though the evening could not have been arranged any other way.
That feeling of inevitability is what you're building. And it is built entirely through programming.
The Shape of an Evening
Every revue I ever directed had the same underlying shape. Not the same material — God forbid — but the same architecture. I learned it at the Greenwich Village Follies in 1919 and I never found a reason to abandon it, because it is not a formula. It is a description of how audiences actually experience an evening of variety.
Here is the shape:
The Opening. Fast, bright, company-sized. You are making a promise to the audience: This is what kind of evening you're in for. You are also solving a practical problem — the audience is still settling, still coughing, still reading their programs. The opening number must be strong enough to command attention and forgiving enough to survive inattention. It is the handshake. You don't tell your life story in a handshake.
The Early Numbers. After the opening, you have the audience's goodwill but not yet their trust. The early numbers must earn that trust. This is where you put your strongest comic sketch — something with a clear payoff, something that makes the audience laugh and think: these people are good. Follow it with a song that shifts the tone. You have already taught the audience the first rule of the revue: anything can happen next.
The First Act Build. Now you are building toward the first act curtain. The numbers should grow in scale, in ambition, in emotional reach. This is where you introduce your biggest production number of the first half — the one with the full company, the one Raoul designs to stop time. Follow it with something intimate. A solo. A duet. The contrast makes both numbers bigger than they would be alone.
The First Act Closer. This is the number the audience carries into intermission. It must land. It doesn't have to be the biggest number in the show — in fact, it often shouldn't be. The best first act closers leave the audience wanting more, not satisfied. You want them to come back from the bar. A question mark is more powerful than an exclamation point — at intermission.
The Second Act Opener. The audience has had a drink. They've talked. They're warm. You can take a risk here that you couldn't take in Act One. This is where I would often put the most daring number in the program — the one that's strange, or dark, or experimental. The audience is loose enough to follow you somewhere unexpected.
The Second Act Build. Same principle as the first act, but faster. The audience knows the rules now. They trust you. You can move more quickly between tones, styles, scales. The variety itself becomes the pleasure.
The Finale. Everything you've been building toward. In a book musical, the finale resolves the story. In a revue, the finale resolves the experience. It brings back the themes, the colors, the energy of the whole evening and concentrates them into one last number. The audience should feel that the entire evening was leading here — even though it wasn't. That is the trick. The finale creates the story retroactively.
The Three Laws of Programming
Underneath that shape, three principles govern every decision about what goes where:
1. Contrast is king.
Never follow like with like. A ballad after a ballad is death. A sketch after a sketch is tedium. A big production number after a big production number is exhaustion. The audience needs contrast — in tone, in scale, in energy, in style. A quiet song after a loud dance. A solo after a full company number. A comedy sketch after an emotional ballad. The contrast is not just variety for its own sake. Contrast is what makes each individual number register. A diamond looks brightest against black velvet. Every number in a revue should be the black velvet for the number that follows it.
2. Build, don't plateau.
The evening must have a sense of forward motion — a feeling that it is going somewhere, growing, accumulating. This doesn't mean every number is bigger or louder than the last. It means the evening is deepening. The stakes are rising. The audience is being drawn further in. A revue that plateaus — that settles into a comfortable groove and stays there — loses the audience even if every individual number is good. The program must feel like it's heading somewhere, even without a plot to provide that direction.
3. Protect your performers.
This is the one nobody talks about. Every performer has a best slot — a moment in the evening where their particular energy, style, and material will land hardest. A high-energy comedian dies in the opening slot if the audience isn't warmed up. A subtle singer gets swallowed if she follows a blockbuster production number. Part of programming is matchmaking — not just what number goes where, but what performer goes where. I built the program for New Faces of 1952 around the specific energies of Eartha Kitt, Paul Lynde, Robert Clary, Alice Ghostley, and Carol Lawrence. Each of them had a slot that was theirs. Eartha followed comedy — so the audience was open and laughing when she hit them with "Monotonous." Paul Lynde came after a dance number — so the stage was clear and the audience was ready for a single voice with something to say. I wasn't just programming numbers. I was programming the audience's emotional readiness to receive each performer at their best.
The Practical Method
How do you actually do this?
I used index cards. One number per card. I would spread them across a table — sometimes the floor, if the table wasn't big enough — and move them around. For hours. Sometimes days. I would read the sequence out loud, imagining myself as the audience, asking: What do I feel right now? What do I want to feel next?
The method is simple. The execution is not. You will try fifty arrangements before you find the one that works. You will fall in love with a sequence that puts your best number in a terrible slot, and you will have to break it apart and start over. You will discover that two numbers you thought were both essential are actually doing the same job, and one of them has to go.
This is the hardest part of programming: the willingness to cut. A revue director must be ruthless about material. If a number is good but it doesn't serve the program — if it duplicates a tone, if it breaks the build, if it sits in a slot where it can't land — it must go. The evening is more important than any individual number. Always.
I cut a number from the Almanac that got a standing ovation in rehearsal. It was a beautiful piece. But it was a ballad that fell between two other ballads, and no amount of rearranging could fix it without breaking something else. I cut it. The composer didn't speak to me for a week. The show ran 229 performances. The evening was right.
What Programming Gives You
When the programming is right, the audience experiences something they cannot name but absolutely feel: the sense that the evening was designed. Not thrown together. Not a random sequence of good acts. But a shaped experience — with a beginning, a middle, and an end — that arrived at its destination with purpose.
This is what the revue offers that no other form can match. Not a story, but a shape. Not a narrative, but an experience. Curated, paced, contrasted, built — by a director who understands that in the absence of plot, programming is dramaturgy.
The blank page. The index cards. The question: what goes where, and why?
That is where every revue begins. That is the director's first job. And if you get it right, everything that follows — the lights, the costumes, the performances, the design — has a structure to live inside.
Get it wrong, and no amount of spectacle will save you.
This is Part 1 of "The Anatomy of a Revue," a ten-part series by John Murray Anderson and Raoul Pène du Bois on the craft of building a musical revue. Next: Raoul on the design of transitions.