• The Little Theater is a nonprofit organization devoted to staging plays for children. The theater has a very small full-time professional administrative staff. Through a special arrangement with the actors’ union, actors and directors rehearse without pay and are paid only for actual performances. The costs from the current year’s planning budget appear below. The Little Theater had tentatively planned to put on six different productions with a total of 108 performances. For example, one of the productions was Peter Rabbit, which had a six-week run with three performances on each weekend. The Little Theater Costs from the Planning Budget For the Year Ended December 31 Budgeted number of productions.................................. Budgeted number of performances................................ Actors’ and directors’ wages......................................... Stagehands’ wages......................................................... Ticket booth personnel and ushers’ wages..................... Scenery, costumes, and props........................................ Theater hall rent.............................................................. Printed programs............................................................ Publicity......................................................................... Administrative expenses................................................ Total ............................................................................... 6 108 $216,000 32,400 16,200 108,000 54,000 27,000 12,000 43,200 $508,800 Some of the costs vary with the number of productions, some with the number of performances, and some are fixed and depend on neither the number of productions nor the number of performances. The costs of scenery, costumes, props, and publicity vary with the number of productions. It doesn’t make any difference how many times Peter Rabbit is performed, the cost of the scenery is the same. Likewise, the cost of publicizing a play with posters and radio commercials is the same whether there are 10, 20, or 30 performances of the play. On the other hand, the wages of the actors, directors, stagehands, ticket booth personnel, and ushers vary with the number of performances. The greater the number of performances, the higher the wage costs will be. Similarly, the costs of renting the hall and printing the programs will vary with the number of performances. Administrative expenses are more difficult to pin down, but the best estimate is that approximately 75% of the budgeted costs are fixed, 15% depend on the number of productions staged, and the remaining 10% depend on the number of performances. After the beginning of the year, the board of directors of the theater authorized expanding the theater’s program to seven productions and a total of 168 performances. Not surprisingly, actual costs were considerably higher than the costs from the planning budget. (Grants from donors and ticket sales were also correspondingly higher, but are not shown here.) Data concerning the actual costs appear below: The Little Theater Actual Costs For the Year Ended December 31 Actual number of productions....................................... Actual number of performances..................................... Actors’ and directors’ wages......................................... Stagehands’ wages......................................................... Ticket booth personnel and ushers’ wages..................... Scenery, costumes, and props........................................ Theater hall rent.............................................................. Printed programs............................................................ Publicity......................................................................... Administrative expenses................................................ Total............................................................................... 7 168 $341,800 49,700 25,900 130,600 78,000 38,300 15,100 47,500 $726,900 Required: 1. Prepare a flexible budget for The Little Theater based on the actual activity of the year. 2. Prepare a report for the year that shows the spending variances for all expense items. 3. If you were on the board of directors of the theater, would you be pleased with how well costs were controlled during the year? Why, or why not? 4. The cost formulas provide figures for the average cost per production and average cost per performance. How accurate do you think these figures would be for predicting the cost of a new production or of an additional performance of a particular production?