A recital program has a job a theatre playbill doesn't: parents are flipping through it in the dark trying to find out when their kid is on. Forty routines, three hundred dancers, two acts and an intermission — the program has to be scannable first and pretty second. The free playbill maker was built with that in mind, and this page shows how to map a recital onto it.

Routines as the running order

Use the running order section for the show itself. Add a subheading for Act One, then one item per routine: the routine or song title on the first line, and the class or level on the detail line — "Tuesday 4:30 Ballet II", "Senior Company", "Hip Hop 8–10". Number the routines in the title ("12. Rhythm of the Rain") so a parent can find number 12 in seconds. Add a subheading for Intermission with the length, then Act Two. Items can be reordered with the arrows when the director changes the order on dress-rehearsal night, which she will.

Dancers as the cast

The cast section is a two-column list with dot leaders: something on the left, a name on the right. For a recital, put the class on the left and the dancers on the right — one row per dancer, or one row per class with the dancers listed together. For a big studio, the ensemble field is quicker: paste every dancer's name separated by commas and they wrap into a neat paragraph under a heading such as "Our Dancers" or "Company". Rename the headings to whatever your studio says.

The production team section takes the studio owner, teachers, choreographers, the stage manager, the backstage moms and dads, and the lighting and sound crew. Who's who is the place for a short bio of each teacher, or for the graduating seniors — a paragraph each, with a photo-free layout that keeps the file small and prints cleanly.

Sponsors pay for the printing

Recital programs are usually funded by ads: the dance-wear shop, the orthodontist, the pizza place next to the studio, and "Good luck, Sophie! Love, Grandma" messages sold by the quarter page. List the sponsor tiers by name, then add the ad artwork as images — full-page, half-page or quarter-page. Two quarter-page ads share a row; a full-page ad gets a page of its own. Artwork is placed as sent, never cropped, so what the orthodontist approved is what prints.

Booklet size and page count

The program is a saddle-stitched booklet: half-letter or A5 pages printed two-up on Letter or A4 sheets and folded in half. The page count grows automatically as routines and dancers are added — 8, 12, 16 pages and so on — and the spare pages before the back cover become autograph pages, which younger dancers adore. If the print shop quoted a fixed size, set that as the minimum and the booklet is padded to match. Print at actual size, double-sided, and run the one-sheet calibration test the first time so the backs come out the right way up.

And the QR code on the tickets

Studios put on one recital a year, often with the same poster and ticket design. Host the digital version of the program at a permanent link and the QR code on the tickets works every spring — you just replace the PDF. See a digital playbill with a QR code, or start from the general playbill template guide.