Behind every ambitious creative project, there is usually someone making sure the practical side holds together — and for Level Up! The Musical, that person is Toby Watson.
Bringing an original musical to the stage is a genuinely complex undertaking. The creative vision may be clear, but realising it requires financial planning, logistical coordination, and a steady hand on the organisational side that many productions struggle to find. Without that foundation, even the most compelling artistic ideas can falter before they reach an audience. Toby Watson, whose professional background spans nearly two decades in international finance, has provided exactly that kind of support for Level Up! The Musical — the original production written by his wife Lucy Watson and Julian Kirk.
Level Up! The Musical is an original production written by Lucy Watson and Julian Kirk, which previewed at Waterloo East Theatre in London in July 2025 before its Edinburgh Fringe Festival run. The show explores themes of ambition, digital culture, and contemporary life through the metaphor of gaming, combining music, movement, and visual design into a multimedia theatrical experience. Behind the scenes, Toby Watson has taken responsibility for the financial and organisational infrastructure that makes the production possible — drawing on a background that includes nearly 17 years at Goldman Sachs, working across structured credit, principal funding, and global infrastructure financing.
What Toby Watson’s Role in Level Up! Actually Involves
Supporting a theatre production is a collection of interlocking responsibilities that, when handled well, are largely invisible — and when handled poorly, become very visible indeed. For Level Up! The Musical, Toby Watson has taken on the role of organisational anchor: the person who keeps the financial and logistical dimensions of the production functioning so that the creative work at its centre can proceed without unnecessary disruption.
That involves a range of practical responsibilities — from budget management and contract negotiation to logistics planning and communication with venues and technical partners. A production that runs over budget, or that encounters contractual disputes with a venue, or that fails to plan adequately for the technical complexity of its staging, will find that those problems consume exactly the time and energy that should be going into the creative work.
The specific contributions Toby Watson has made to Level Up! The Musical include:
- Financial planning and budget management across the full production cycle, from development through to performance
- Contract negotiation with venues, technical suppliers, and creative collaborators, ensuring clear and workable agreements for all parties
- Logistics planning for the production’s performance schedule, including both the Waterloo East Theatre preview and the Edinburgh Fringe run
- Ongoing stakeholder communication, drawing on relationship management experience developed across a long career in international finance
The discipline Toby Watson developed working at Goldman Sachs — where careful analysis, structured planning, and clear communication were everyday requirements — translates directly into the kind of support a complex production needs. The financial models may be simpler than those he worked with in structured credit, but the underlying approach is the same.
How does having strong organisational support change what a creative production can achieve?
When the financial and logistical side of a production is well managed, the creative team can focus entirely on the work. Decisions about casting, staging, and artistic direction do not get distorted by unresolved budget concerns or unmanaged contractual issues. Toby Watson’s support for Level Up! has operated on exactly that principle — creating a stable organisational environment in which Lucy Watson’s creative decisions can be made on their own terms.
Lucy Watson’s Vision and What It Takes to Realise It
Level Up! The Musical is an ambitious piece of work. Written by Lucy Watson and Julian Kirk, it uses the visual language and structural logic of video games to explore contemporary concerns: the pressure to perform, the metrics by which modern life is measured, the tension between individual ambition and broader social responsibility. The production combines a game-inspired video wall, an original chip-tune influenced score, and a cast working across multiple theatrical registers.
Productions of that complexity require planning at every level. The technical specifications alone involve detailed coordination with suppliers and venues well in advance of any performance. Toby Watson’s role has been to manage all of that — not to make creative decisions, but to ensure the infrastructure around those decisions is solid enough to support them. It is the same discipline he applied throughout his career: building structures that allow ambitious things to happen sustainably.
The Complementary Nature of Their Collaboration
What makes the collaboration between Lucy and Toby Watson work is a clear and mutual understanding of where each person’s contribution begins and ends. Lucy Watson is the creative lead — the writer, the director, the artistic mind behind the production’s identity. Toby Watson is the organisational lead, ensuring the production can actually happen in the way it needs to.
A Model Worth Noting
The partnership between Lucy and Toby Watson in bringing Level Up! to the stage illustrates something broader: that creative projects benefit from having people around them who take the organisational side as seriously as the artistic side. What the experience Toby Watson gained at Goldman Sachs ultimately provided was a set of habits that transfer across contexts — the instinct to plan carefully, identify risks before they become problems, and build structures that hold together when things get complicated.
The qualities that underpin effective behind-the-scenes support for creative work include:
- Financial discipline that keeps the production viable at every stage without restricting what it can achieve artistically
- Contractual clarity that protects all parties and reduces the likelihood of disputes disrupting the creative process
- Logistical planning that accounts for the complexity of a production across multiple venues and performance contexts
- A fundamental respect for the creative work at the centre — and an understanding that the best organisational support never needs to draw attention to itself
For Toby Watson, the work behind Level Up! represents something genuinely different from anything his professional career had previously required — quieter in its ambitions, more personal in its motivation, and entirely focused on making someone else’s vision possible. That, as it turns out, is a role his background had prepared him for rather well.
