The outfits before the script

Every year, somewhere, a school play goes wrong in the same way. The outfits are sewn in February, the scenery is painted in March, and the script is finished a week before the performance, bent into shape around a dragon suit nobody wants to waste.

The outfits matter. A play with bad ones looks careless, and the children remember them for years. But they are not where the play is decided. A story can go a thousand directions, and there are only so many ways to dress a shepherd. The part with the widest range of outcomes has to come first, and everything else follows it.

Marketing gets this backwards all the time. The colours, the music, the logo and the look of the photos get settled early, because they are easy to talk about and pleasant to choose. The offer itself, what is being sold to whom and why they would care, gets worked out later and squeezed in to fit.

The craft jobs are real and they are hard. Done badly, they drag down everything around them. But their job is to carry an idea further, not to decide what the idea is.

Two questions help. Which part of this, done merely well, would still sink it? That part goes first and gets the best attention. And which part do I actually want to own: the one that sets the shape, or the one that makes the shape sing? Both are honourable. They are not the same job, and confusing them is how the dragon ends up writing the play.