Hi! 

Huge news for everyone who hasn’t already seen it on Instagram: Lizzie is going to Steppenwolf! The show will be part of their summer Lookout series. We’ve got three shows July 10 and 11 at 7:30pm and a matinee for everyone’s grandparents July 11 at 3pm. Tickets are here and Brady is making some fun merch to trade for your hard earned money. I am so proud of everyone who helped make the first run of this show a dang hit and excited to take all of our cardboard trash to this legendary theater <3 

I’m splitting my debrief of The Lizzie McGuire Movie: The Play into a few different newsletters, because SO much went into this project. Plus, my first draft of this newsletter was like 3,500 words. It was Derek Begrudgingly's biggest show when accounting for cast, budget, timeline, and venue size. This newsletter will focus on the the budget and how we spent the big grant we got. I’ll ramble at length about my directing philosophy and being addicted to Disney Channel’s role in Iraq War propaganda in a later issue.

I’ve been living and breathing this show since the production team of eight (including myself) first met in January of 2025. I applied for three grants to fund this show and got one from the Illinois Arts Council for $10,100. I had to pay taxes on it (booo!) but it was still awesome. We started rehearsals in late summer and eventually put up the show at the end of September at Color Club in Old Irving Park.

Peep the full program (designed by Faith Latorre) and see just how many people helped out with this show.

Now for the money…

We spent $11,255 to put up this show with a total post-tax, post-venue cut income of $11,648 ($7,070 of that came from our Illinois Arts Council Grant post tax).

This is kinda small, so if you need a larger chart, it’s here.

Real Dinner Cut fans know I run my shows so that the cost to put on the show (props, costumes, rehearsal rentals, food, etc) is totally covered by ticket and merch sales. And whatever is leftover goes to the cast. Because we got this gorgeous, stunning grant, we put all of that towards paying people.

Here’s how that broke down (don’t tell me if the math isn’t right, I’ve already filed my taxes)

It is so wild because to me, as Matty Merritt, $10,100 is a lot of money. But to producer of fine community theater Matty, $10,100 is just enough to pay my friends the bare minimum. And if I broke down how much everyone was making per hour working on this show, it would be about 13 cents. But we are not venture capitalists, we are barely even a business. Dinner Cut is only an LLC in case a pole falls on someones head and they want to sue me. My financial goals for shows have always been for no one to lose money and no one to be hungry at rehearsal. So far we have been knocking it out of the park. Plus, 24% of our non labor spend went to local businesses in Chicago, up from 16% in the previous show.

I’m putting the leftover $392 towards the Lizzie’s Steppenwolf run. We gotta get Paolo some bell bottoms.

Hell yeah, I’ll run an ad for the bird folks.

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Next Issue: The making of The Lizzie McGuire Movie: The Play part deux.

Thanks for reading and, as always, don’t tell me about any typos unless they are really bad.