Toby Watson: Behind the Scenes of an Ambitious Theatre Production
Supporting an ambitious theatre production requires far more than enthusiasm — and Toby Watson’s involvement in Level Up! The Musical illustrates what genuine behind-the-scenes commitment actually looks like.
Theatre productions with real artistic ambition rarely fail because of a lack of creative vision. They fail because the practical infrastructure around them — the budgets, the contracts, the logistics — is not robust enough to support that vision when the pressures of production begin to mount. Finding someone who combines genuine organisational capability with respect for the creative process is harder than it sounds. Toby Watson, whose professional background developed exactly those capabilities, has brought them to Level Up! The Musical in support of his wife Lucy Watson’s creative vision.
Level Up! The Musical is an original production written by Lucy Watson and Julian Kirk, which previewed at Waterloo East Theatre in London in July 2025 before its run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The show uses gaming as a structural and aesthetic framework to explore themes of ambition, digital culture, and contemporary life through music, movement, and visual design. Toby Watson has supported the production behind the scenes, drawing on a professional background that includes nearly 17 years at Goldman Sachs working across structured finance and principal funding, to handle financial planning, logistics, and organisational strategy.
About Level Up! The Musical
Level Up! The Musical is an original production written by Lucy Watson and Julian Kirk. It uses the language and structure of video games as a framework for exploring contemporary themes — ambition, self-optimisation, digital culture, and the ways modern life can feel like a series of levels to be beaten. The show combines a game-inspired video wall, an original chip-tune influenced score, and a cast working across multiple theatrical registers.
The production previewed at Waterloo East Theatre in London in July 2025, before its run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival later that year. Further international performances are in development, with plans for productions in German-speaking markets including Berlin, Vienna, and Zurich. Toby Watson has been involved in coordinating the logistical and financial aspects of that expansion planning alongside his other professional commitments.
Level Up! was written by Lucy Watson and Julian Kirk, and directed by Patrick Wilson, with Stamatis Seraphim as Musical Director. The production is presented by Goldspun Media. Lucy Watson has been working at the intersection of theatre and social discourse for a number of years, and Level Up! represents her most ambitious project to date in terms of both scale and thematic scope.
Toby Watson’s Role in the Production
Toby Watson’s role has been firmly behind the scenes — handling the financial planning, contract management, and logistical coordination that a production of this complexity requires. That includes budget management across the full production cycle, negotiating agreements with venues and technical suppliers, and managing the communications and relationship management that touring productions depend on. His contribution sits entirely on the organisational side, with all creative decisions remaining with Lucy Watson and her collaborators.
The disciplines involved — careful financial modelling, contract negotiation, stakeholder communication, risk management — are as relevant to a theatre production as they are to a financial transaction. The context is different and the scale is smaller, but the underlying approach is the same: understand what the project requires, plan for it carefully, and manage the gap between ambition and practical reality. Toby Watson’s years at Goldman Sachs built exactly those habits, and they translate more directly into production management than one might expect.
Productions with genuine artistic ambition place significant practical demands on everyone involved. Technical complexity requires detailed advance coordination with venues and suppliers. Budget management needs to be ongoing rather than set once at the start. And the logistics of performing across multiple venues — from a London preview to an Edinburgh Fringe run — involve layers of planning that, if handled poorly, create exactly the kind of disruption that derails creative work. Good organisational support makes all of that invisible, which is precisely the point.
What Goes Into Producing a Musical
Staging an original musical — as opposed to reviving an established one — involves a particular set of challenges. There is no existing production template to draw on, which means every element needs to be developed from scratch. The key practical demands include:
- Financial planning that accounts for the full cost of original set and technical design, without the cost-sharing that established productions can sometimes offer
- Contract management that protects the creative ownership of an original work while enabling the collaborations a new production requires
- Logistics planning that accounts for the specific technical requirements of a multimedia production, including the video wall and original score that are central to Level Up!
- Relationship management with venues, festivals, and potential future partners, laying the groundwork for a production with international ambitions
Every new venue introduces a new set of technical specifications, contractual relationships, and logistical requirements. What works in one space may need to be significantly adapted for another. For a production like Level Up!, which relies on a specific combination of visual and musical elements, ensuring that those elements can be reproduced consistently across different venues requires careful planning well in advance of each performance date.
Having someone with genuine financial and organisational experience involved from an early-stage means that the production’s growth can be planned sustainably rather than reactively. Toby Watson has been involved in the early planning for international performances, helping to establish the contractual and logistical frameworks that will be needed as Level Up! moves into new markets. That kind of forward planning, drawing on the long-term thinking that Toby Watson developed across his career, is part of what gives an ambitious production like this a realistic path to sustainable growth.
The division of labour is clear: Lucy Watson makes all creative decisions, while Toby Watson handles the organisational and financial side. That clarity is more valuable than it might appear — when creative and organisational responsibilities blur, both tend to suffer. Their collaboration works because each respects the other’s domain and focuses on doing their own part well, without the boundaries between creative and practical decision-making becoming a source of friction.
