@macsound, theater's often less efficient. Not necessarily in terms of tours, but resident
theatre is very much "put however many hours in that you need to", which ultimately means less budget available to pay people per hour. The
scenic designer can simply walk into the shop and decide to change something at the last minute and then someone's working into the night to fix that. One of the theaters here in town has a reputation for doing notes with the electricians to walk through each light they focused that day, one by one, requiring scenic, costumes,
props, sound, and all the other designers to be present for that absurd exercise.
Designers also often have little idea what their designs cost, which leads to more meetings and hey-what-about-this and time spent messing around only to find out that the budget can't afford xyz. I've also worked with a number of designers who simply want to design more stuff simply to scratch their own itch. They don't want to use stock goods or whatever to save on costs for a show. They want to design without constraints like college taught them to. One of my professors
insisted you must only paint with
Rosco scenic paint -- which is fine if you're teaching a
scenic artist's class but terrible if you're trying to maintain a budget. One season he blew the budget halfway into the season and the final show ended up being
stock platforms and flats because they ran out of money 3-4 months earlier after restocking the shop with
Rosco paint.
Ultimately though theater schools are doing a major disservice by almost never talking about the business management side of theater. The workforce ends up being tons of people who have no idea how to value their time, value the time of others, ask for more money, say no to last minute changes/redesigns/
etc. Many smaller theaters also don't understand the importance of farming charitable giving, grants, and so forth. They don't know how to
play the game so they can properly fund their seasons, and as a consequence of that they've learned to exploit interns and expect long hours for low wages in pursuit of their artistic endeavor. When I was in school I tried to press my professors to talk to us about negotiating design fees and contracts and they basically refused to. Not sure if they didn't want to talk about their pay or if they were reluctant because they felt they didn't know enough about that to be teaching it to others, but they're basically just sending theater students out there into the world and leaving them to fend for themselves.