I really love it when people really love the things they love.
Like my friend Corey. She loves the theatre.
No but, like, she… really, really loves the theatre. We’ve got the proof.
MY FRIENDS, IF YOU LIKE GRAPHS OR METICULOUS DATA COLLECTION THEN YOU ARE IN FOR A TREAT
Cordelia “Corey” Miller (above, left) is the senior marketing manager at Sonia Freedman Productions. She’s also worked in stage management and let me tell you, if you had a stage, you’d want her to be managing it.
She is my friend. And, easily, the most dedicated theatre fan I have ever met.
Speaking to me, Corey calculated that she spends ten per cent of her waking hours at the theatre.
Whenever anyone hears about Corey - “Oh, I have this friend who’s seen The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night more than 40 times” - they want to know more. So, I asked her to EXCLUSIVELY REVEAL her theatre-tracking spreadsheets to us here at ENTHUSIASM. An honour xx
KATE: For as long as we’ve known each other, I’ve been aware of an insanely detailed spreadsheet you keep. It is a thing of legend. How does it work and forgive my Excel illiteracy but like… what have you got going on in the columns and rows?
I was at a show one evening and sat next to a gentleman my age. We got to chatting and he told me he was a computer engineer, working on developing a programme for tracking theatre, and just needed a huge data set to try it out on.
I went home for Christmas and spent three weeks pulling together various bits of information - logging every ticket stub, checking my collection of playbills, my calendar, my email for receipts for tickets, emails regarding trips to New York, every play that played every single weekend and including whether or not I attended it.
I poured all that data into a plain excel document, noting the title, region, date, and any key info e.g. which celebrity played Hamlet or Macbeth etc., if certain leads were off for shows I was seeing multiple times, etc.
He then wrote a bunch of code into the document that auto generates the following:
Number of shows I see per year
Number of shows I see per region
Percentage of lifetime shows by region
Number of shows by venue in each region and the last show I saw at each venue - it will automatically create a new line every time I go to a new theatre as well
How many times I've seen a show, in a manipulatable graph, e.g. I can look at 'every show I've seen exactly 4 times' or 'every show I've seen at least 10 times'
Due to high attendance and my desire to complete seeing all the actors, every Christopher Boone I saw in The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night
Same reason, but all the understudies I saw in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Tracking the Shakespeare canon and how many times I've seen each one (at the time of creation I had not seen the entire canon - I now have. Fun fact: I flew to Toronto to complete it because nowhere else in the next two years was playing the final show I needed to check off - Henry VIII - and I just needed it done.)
I also have a planning spreadsheet, tracking every show that's on the West End and a good number of affiliate theatres (67 venues total), as well as upcoming shows and rumours, closing dates, venue capacity, theatre owners. It has every show I plan to see and when I've booked it for, and importantly also keeps track of my ATP (average ticket price), which I'm very proud to say is currently just £26.43 for matured performances in 2024, and lifetime London ATP is £21.91.
How many shows have you seen overall?
2,220 as of 31 Mar 2024.
[Editor’s note: it took me ages to publish this interview so Corey has seen more since then!!!!!!!]
What about in the year 2023?
2,178 shows as of 31 Dec 2023; I saw 192 shows in 2023. My 2024 goal is 175.
What’s your most viewed show of all time and how many times have you seen it? (My money is on The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night).
That's correct, Curious Incident. It'll take a while for another show to reach Curious levels as it's currently at 42. Related: I always want to keep Curious as a prime number amount of viewings because it's what [the main character] Christopher would want, but I found a data error a few months ago that puts it at 42 so now I need to see it again.
What are you top 5 most watched shows?
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night: a perfect adaptation of a pre-existing story onstage. I love that it's about a neurodivergent character without ever calling him autistic. Also, it has a puppy in it, what do you want from me.
Matilda: brilliant, funny, has a kickass little girl at the centre of it. She sees injustice and says 'I don't care that I'm 5, I'm going to make this right' and uses her intelligence to do so.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: from a production standpoint, a masterpiece. An incredible creative team at the top of their game.
Groundhog Day: a beautiful allegory for the trajectory of grief, while also managing to be funny, have great design, an incredible central performance, and stage magic.
Can you do some cool maths for me. Like, how many shows are you typically seeing in a month? How many hours would you spend, roughly, inside a theatre every week? What percentage of your waking life do you reckon that is?
So if I average 4-5 shows per week at 2.5 hours per show that's roughly 10 - 12.5 hours a week. If I'm awake 7am - 11pm every day (give or take based on shows and going to the gym) that's 16h a day, so 112h/week. So it's roughly 10% of my waking hours per week.
Talk to me about budgeting. Do you have a sliding scale of what you’ll spend on a show, depending on how much you wanna see it, if you’ve seen it before, or if it stars Gillian Anderson for example?
So I typically will book the second cheapest seats in the house because the cheapest usually carry some type of restricted view.
I believe at one point a few months ago I checked [no one asked me] how many times in all my London shows I had booked tickets over £100 and I think it was only 7 and at least one of those was a gala closing night, one was ABBA Voyage which is expensive, and one was really nice seats to Hadestown for my birthday. I'm extremely protective of my average ticket price.
How many times have you seen Benedict Cumberbatch on stage?
Well given he's a producer of Letters Live, he's performed at almost all of those, so if we assume that's say 17, plus two Hamlets, two Frankenstein, and the National Theatre 50th Birthday celebration… probably about 22 times.
The question underneath all of these other questions, really, is Corey: why do you like theatre so much?
I'm AuDHD, so it provides me those sweet, sweet hyperfixation chemicals.
I think it's like the movies for other people, or any other hobby really, it's a way to escape the world for a bit. I like that I have to turn my phone off. I like that I get to be in another story for 2.5 hours and it might change how I look at the world.
What would happen if, say, there was a ban on live theatre and you couldn’t see shows anymore? What would you do? (To relate, I’m imagining if the government recalled all paperback novels and I couldn’t read anymore)
This is effectively what happened during the pandemic. Theatre was shut down and save the few digital streamers, I had no access to theatre. It was a very awful time, especially around dating, because how do you explain to someone you're dating that if it wasn't the pandemic, 3-5 times a week I'd have been at the theatre? We'd have been going to theatre? How do I connect with someone on something that is so important to me when it doesn't exist right now? I only saw 8 shows in 2020 - about half of which were prior to the lockdown - and 9 in 2021. It was awful. I basically just worked out a lot, which is my other passion. And watched a lot of really bad movies.
If you were going to be in Six the musical, which ex-wife of Henry XIII would you choose to be and why?
I think I want to be Anne Boleyn, she's extremely chaotic and confident, but I'm probably Jane Seymour because I'm a sap with attachment issues?
What’s your favourite theatre snack?
Salty/crunchy - crisps. Sweet - Aero or Maltesers.
What’s your go-to theatre outfit?
Typically I just wear what I wore to work - but sometimes I dress like the artwork for shows when I go on press nights. So for Hadestown I wore black and red, for Oklahoma I wore black, cream and gold, etc. It's not cosplay or anything but it's a fun little twatty thing I do, lol.
What’s your most strongly held opinion about theatre?
Oh lord. I had to really think about this one because I have so many goddamn opinions.
I think it's probably that 'everything needs to be in service of the material.' The text is the inciting incident of why we're all gathered in that house for that performance, right? So if you're going to add something high concept like video, or change the gender presentation or race of a character that radically changes the dynamic of the show or distracts from the central conflict of the material as written - why are you doing that show? Find a script that suits what you want to do better. Don't try to bend it to be something that it isn't.
For example: I saw a production of Little Women where Jo March was portrayed by a transmasc actor (AFAB) and therefore, Jo March was trans. Loads of the text supports this - she's not interested in doing girly things, she doesn't want to wear dresses, doesn't want to date Laurie, isn't interested in 'becoming a young lady,' and I believe she has lines like 'I wish that I were a man'. It adds an interesting lens without pulling you totally from the central themes.
An additional example: in my opinion, you can't update Romeo and Juliet past the mid 90s/early 2000s because once you introduce a world where things like emails, texts, and everyone having personal phones are introduced, it's hard for me to suspend the disbelief that Juliet couldn't communicate to Romeo that she was still alive. The more modern you get, the less believable it becomes - if you place it today she'd just do a Tiktok and send it to all her friends to ensure that he got the message somehow. Two besotted teenagers, off the grid? One of them fakes her suicide but doesn't get the message to her lover? Hard for me to believe. These days that'd go viral.
ARGH COREY I LOVE YOU. I wish you luck reaching your show target this year, and every year, and I thank you for introducing me to Six The Musical. xxxxxx
Let’s wrap this baby up with a few more visual representations of your great passion in life.
In the spirit of this newsletter’s founding principle - ENTHUSIASM - I will be interviewing ENTHUSIASTS about their most beloved, intense, strongly held ENTHUSIASM. If you have a suggestion! Or a request! Lemme know. As I say, I really love it when people really love the things they love.
PREVIOUSLY ON ENTHUSIASM
ENTHUSIASM is a newsletter for people who feel strongly about things. Like, for example, potatoes, human rights and former members of the boy band One Direction. Here, we contain multitudes.
Kate Leaver is an editor, author, and former professional fairy. She writes about dogs, friendship, love, pop culture, sadness, and Taylor Swift. She’s currently writing her first novel, a cautionary tale about fame. She’s represented by Jemima Forrester at David Higham Associates and she really really loves her dog.
I have also been keeping a spreadsheet of my theatre attendance! I am so happy to see that someone else has one too. I’m not nearly as prolific (around 300 shows over 12 years) and I almost never see the same show twice.
I do something similar with my books and reading. I have separate tabs for books I want to read, books I own and haven't yet read and proof copies I have and their publishing date so I know how long I've got to read them before they are out on the world (Try to read proofs before the publication date) However, mine pales in comparison to this - think I have a new project this weekend! Fascinating reading.