How to manage your actors' availability without going crazy

The Excel spreadsheet era

At first, I was organised. I had a beautiful Excel file. Red, green, yellow. Everywhere. Formulas whose logic I'd forgotten three weeks after creating them.

I spent hours updating availability. Then I'd discover an actor had changed their schedule without telling me. You can guess the rest: managing the Excel pack + bad moods, instead of making theatre.

The Google Docs and WhatsApp revolution

So I decided to ditch Excel, switch to Google Sheets and WhatsApp polls. In other words, replace one problem with two others.

Availabilities were in one document, last-minute changes were in WhatsApp, buried between messages: "Are we still rehearsing Tuesday?" "Actually I can make it." "Oh wait, actually I can't."

The day sticky notes won

I ended up managing rehearsals with sticky notes: on my desk, on the screen, in the diary. Scheduling dates felt like solving a Rubik's cube.

After searching for a solution, I realised no tool had been designed for this specific case: an amateur theatre company, with volunteers whose schedules are unpredictable and scenes to rehearse depending on everyone's availability.

So I built DispoThéâtre

First for our own company, then for everyone going through the same headaches — especially those on the verge of losing their temper.

Today, DispoThéâtre lets you: collect members' availability, manage roles, schedule rehearsals, send call sheets, track work progress, and share scene videos.

Because our job is the stage

DispoThéâtre doesn't do everything. But what it does, it does well. It focuses on rehearsal scheduling: managing which scenes can be rehearsed based on members' availability. And with its auto-planner, it can schedule rehearsals according to parameters you choose.

Based on each scene's preparation level, it adjusts rehearsal time and frequency. It can group scenes shared by multiple actors, prioritise consecutive scenes, plan multi-room parallel rehearsals, and handle multiple shows.

I hope this tool saves you as much time as it has saved me. I'm making it freely available and would love to hear your feedback. Server costs will probably mean charging for it eventually — around €20 per year for a company.