Author: Joël Dubé

On The Animated Musical and Egalitarianism Stage Musicals are expensive. Productions cost between seven and eight figures to get off the ground, and the marginal cost to distribute a show more broadly is massive. Stage productions are living breathing pieces of art that take place in a single space and moment in time, it’s part… Continue reading On The Animated Musical and Egalitarianism

Resource Constraints Doing something yourself due to resource constraints isn’t an excuse for that work to fall short of standards in quality. Your work will be consumed without consideration, with no preambles or asterisks. Nobody cares about the situation regarding the creation of your work unless they already care about your work to begin with.… Continue reading Resource Constraints

Should You Be Running? My layover to New York deboarded 65 minutes late, and the initial itinerary gave me an hour and twenty minutes to make my connection. Uh oh. Everyone knew they had 15-20 minutes to get to the opposite end of the airport and make it through US customs.  Half the plane had… Continue reading Should You Be Running?

Growth Growth rarely feels good; the thing that’s painful to think about doing is often the thing you should. Discomfort can be a good heuristic to check if you’re moving in the right direction. 2024

On Retention A stage musical requires a high amount of friction to lose retention. A viewer has to overcome caring they spent good money on a ticket, the time traveling to the theatre, and the imposition to the people around them if they leave any time other than the intermission. A recorded work is a… Continue reading On Retention

Less Better More good isn’t good as less better. 2024

The Service Industry Writing songs for any sort of theatrical project is an act of service. Service towards the story, service towards the character, and service towards the project as a whole. Beautiful things get cut, that’s just how it is. There’s any number of reasons a song could be cut that has nothing to… Continue reading The Service Industry

Batting Averages In baseball a batting average of .300 is considered great, and it is great. But everything has a batting average, and in many areas .300 is unacceptable. What’s a great batting average for showing up to work when you don’t want to? .800? If someone doesn’t work a fifth of the days they… Continue reading Batting Averages

Professionalism Professionalism has the most value when everything is burning down around you. It’s not hard to be professional when things are going well. 2023

Incompetence All skills are born out of incompetence, we’ve all heard adages about how the professional has made more mistakes than the amateur. But there’s a caveat.   Someone who is very skilled likely doesn’t repeat mistakes, because the tension between the mistakes they’ve made and  the standard they set for themselves is so painful… Continue reading Incompetence