Editor’s note: With the release of Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie on the way this week, we decided to spotlight the franchise’s other spinoff that’s selling out theaters: Gabby’s Dollhouse Live! The making of this stage show provides insights into what it takes for brands to mount a successful, long-running production.

The audience takes their seats, the curtain rises, and the lights hit center stage as a beloved TV character comes to life. These experiences create lasting memories for kids, who sing the songs, show off exclusive merch and relive their favorite moments for days, weeks and sometimes months afterward.

For brand owners, kids stage shows are a powerful strategy for turning young theater-goers ages three to eight into lifelong fans. But while the payoff of these productions is significant, so are the challenges of creating one from scratch. 

The first step is the most crucial, and the most difficult—finding a partner that understands your brand’s identity and can bring it to life in a truly memorable way. 

Act one

When it comes to making this choice, brand owners have a wealth of options, ranging from Seattle Children’s Theatre, Wishing Star Productions and TheatreWorksUSA, to TEG Life Like Touring, Windmill Theatre Company, Round Room Live and Terrapin Station Entertainment. Each of these players has years of experience in developing original stage shows for kids and partnering with IP owners to bring hot properties into this space. 

In some cases, a theatrical producer may even approach a brand owner with a pitch if they believe the brand has the entertainment potential to mount a successful tour. That was the case in 2022, when Terrapin Station and TEG both reached out to DreamWorks Animation about adapting its CG-animated preschool series Gabby’s Dollhouse into a touring experience. The companies would eventually join forces to make the show come to life.

Terrapin saw several things in Gabby that made it an ideal candidate for this kind of brand extension, including strong viewership, rampant audience engagement on social platforms, a developed consumer products program and an upcoming expansion into feature films—which pointed to this year being the right time to take the property on the road, says founder and CEO Jonathan Shank. 

“Having Gabby’s Dollhouse Live! and the movie premiere in the same year just feels like incredible synergy,” he notes. “It took about 18 months to produce the show and plot out the full tour across the US, but this incubation period is never set in stone, and can vary greatly depending on the scale of the production.” 

Gabby’s first North American tour kicked off in Long Beach, California on September 19, and the attraction is scheduled to make stops in 75 more cities before ending its run in late December. 

The key to building a production is identifying what audiences already love about the series and making that the centerpiece of the experience, Shank notes. For Gabby, this means putting music from the series front and center, so audiences can sing and dance along to favorite tracks, like “Sprinkle Party,” “You Can’t Spell Meow Without Me” and, of course, the title theme “Hey Gabby.” 

To support their score, Terrapin and TEG crafted an original narrative that’s set in the dollhouse and reimagines Gabby’s feline companions as unique puppets. The partners designed the show from the ground up, with DreamWorks’ parent company Universal providing branded assets and approving specific elements along the way.

Touring production

But while the development of Gabby’s Dollhouse Live! (pictured) went smoothly, the core challenge for any theatrical tour in today’s market is securing affordable venues that can support the experience at scale. 

“We’re in the business of running experiences that can comfortably serve 5,000 people at a time, but in family entertainment, you can only drive the ticket price up to a certain level because it needs to remain as accessible as possible,” says Shank. “Like our relationship with TEG, many show operators are signing partnerships and hunting for sponsors to mitigate costs, because expenses have gone up exponentially over the past five years.” 

These recent cost increases are driven by lingering pandemic-era disruptions, and they are making everything from labor, materials and international freight, to staffing, services and venue rentals significantly more expensive. 

Despite these challenges, Shank says the demand for live experiences—especially from families—is at an all-time high for Terrapin. And this is pushing the company to expand the reach of its shows internationally.

Backstage pass

As co-presidents of Round Room Live, another company that specializes in live shows for kids, Stephen Shaw and Jonathan Linden say it’s more critical than ever for operators to maximize their budgets by developing shows with sustainability in mind from the get-go. To achieve this, Round Room plans its tours with stops that are geographically close in order to reduce travel time, lower fuel costs and limit the need for extra drivers.

“We also want to minimize the use of single-use materials by investing in reusable set components,” adds Shaw. “All of our sets, props and costumes need to meet a high-quality standard to ensure that they can [last for the length] of the tour. Meanwhile, we’re also working with local crews and suppliers on the show’s remaining materials to reduce our overall emissions footprint.”

Round Room has also started incorporating video backdrops, which is doubly beneficial  to the bottom line, in that it reduces the need for elaborate physical set elements while creating a more immersive and flexible viewing experience—particularly for young audiences—by simply reusing visual assets provided by the IP owner. 

Some notable Round Room shows using this technology include Blippi: Join the Band, CoComelon: Sing-A-Long Live and Sesame Street Live! Elmo & Friends Say Hello—all of which have broken the one-and-done mold and embarked on a second tour. 

Round Room looks at several metrics to gauge whether a show can run for multiple years, including overall ticket sales, exclusive merchandise opportunities, audience feedback, brand partner satisfaction and emerging markets where the IP is showing signs of taking off. 

“Many of our productions evolve into a franchise model, with dedicated touring business units that run each show,” says Linden. “But you can’t just sit still, because a brand can just as quickly lose steam. We always have to be open-minded about how we can change elements of the show to keep it going, while also keeping an eye open for emerging properties that are primed to take its place.”