Moody “has more passion for new theater than anyone else I’ve met,” Waller-Bridge said: “Once she believes in your play, she will not stop until it is in front of an audience.”
In a video interview, Richard Gadd, the writer and star of “Baby Reindeer,” was similarly effusive. Moody “very much has a belief of letting the creatives be,” he said, rather than deluging them with suggestions for how to change a script.
For all Moody’s hits, there have been misses, too. In 2012, she produced “Nola,” a verbatim play about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill that she said she had struggled to sum up in a pithy sentence and which didn’t grab audiences. Moody said she put that play on in a too-big, 220-seat theater. “We were getting 100 people a day, which is a great number for Edinburgh,” Moody recalled, but she said it was disastrous: “It felt empty.” Now, she said, she tends to put shows on in small venues because if they sell out, that generates buzz.
There are benefits of being a well-known producer at the Fringe, including that fans seek out your productions so more tickets sell and budgets increase. When Moody first staged “Fleabag,” she could only spend about 10,000 pounds, or about $12,700. This year, each of her shows has a budget of some £85,000, about $108,000 — money that Moody said she won’t recoup in Edinburgh, but might if a production transfers to London.
Even if Moody’s funds are now gigantic by Fringe standards, she still can’t avoid the realities of life at the festival, including the teething problems that many shows experience. At a recent performance of “Weather Girl,” Moody walked into the auditorium to find it filled with smoke because of a faulty haze machine. Shortly afterward, she learned that 10 people had sneaked in without tickets, so the venue was overcapacity and the play couldn’t start.
Moody walked across the stage waving fog away with a flier, and went into a back room to explain the situation to Julia McDermott, the show’s star. “You’re getting a real Fringe experience,” Moody recalled telling her. Then, Moody headed back into the auditorium to fix the machine and evict the interlopers. “A producer’s work is never done,” she said.
Read More: What’s the Next ‘Baby Reindeer’? This Producer Might Have the Script.
