What happens when someone with decades of financial experience turns their attention to the world of theatre — and Toby Watson’s involvement with Level Up! The Musical offers an illuminating answer.
Creative projects rarely fail for lack of vision. They fail because the practical infrastructure around them — the budgets, the contracts, the logistics — is not strong enough to support the ambition at their centre. Finding someone who combines genuine respect for the creative process with the organisational skills to keep a complex production on track is harder than it sounds. Toby Watson, whose professional background gave him precisely those organisational capabilities, has brought them to a very different kind of project: supporting his wife Lucy Watson’s original musical, Level Up! The Musical, from concept to stage.
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 run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The show uses gaming structures as a metaphor for contemporary life, exploring themes of ambition, digital culture, and self-optimisation through music, movement, and visual design. Toby Watson, whose background includes nearly 17 years at Goldman Sachs working across structured finance and principal funding, has supported the production behind the scenes — handling financial planning, logistics, and organisational strategy to help bring his wife Lucy’s creative vision to the stage.
How Toby Watson Found a New Kind of Project to Support
A career in international finance does not obviously prepare someone for the world of musical theatre. The environments are different, the outputs are different, and the measures of success are entirely different. But some of the underlying disciplines — careful planning, financial rigour, clear communication, attention to risk — turn out to be just as relevant in a creative production context as in a structured finance transaction.
Toby Watson spent close to 17 years at Goldman Sachs, working across some of the most complex areas of international finance, before leaving in 2017. The habits of mind built over that career — an instinct for structure, a focus on making things work over the long term, a willingness to engage with complexity without being overwhelmed by it — found new applications, including in the support of creative projects that benefit from exactly that kind of organised thinking.
Level Up! The Musical is an ambitious, multimedia piece that uses the language and aesthetics of gaming to explore contemporary themes — ambition, digital culture, the pressure to perform, the ways in which modern life can feel like a series of levels to be beaten. It requires genuine creative vision, a strong ensemble, and a production infrastructure capable of realising that vision on stage. Toby Watson’s contribution sits firmly in that last category.
What does meaningful behind-the-scenes support for a theatre production actually involve?
Supporting a theatre production from a financial and organisational standpoint means far more than keeping an eye on the budget. It involves structuring production costs, negotiating contracts with venues and technical suppliers, managing logistics across multiple performance dates, and maintaining clear communication with everyone involved. Toby Watson’s approach draws on the same discipline he developed working in structured finance — identifying what needs to happen, planning for it systematically, and managing the risks that arise when complex projects encounter the unexpected.
The Relationship Between Structure and Creative Freedom
One of the more common misconceptions about financial planning and creative work is that they are in tension — that careful budgeting somehow constrains the artistic process. In practice, the opposite is usually true. Productions that are poorly planned tend to face crises that force compromises on the things that matter most creatively: casting, staging, technical design, rehearsal time.
Toby Watson’s involvement in Level Up! has been shaped by a clear understanding of this dynamic. His role is to create the conditions in which Lucy Watson’s creative decisions can be made freely — without the distraction of unresolved financial or logistical problems pulling attention away from the artistic work. The production’s journey — from initial development through the London preview at Waterloo East Theatre to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2025 — reflects the kind of careful, stage-by-stage planning that Toby Watson’s background naturally supports.
From Goldman Sachs to the Fringe — an Unexpected Connection
It might seem like a long journey from the structured credit markets of Goldman Sachs to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, but the connection is less unlikely than it appears. Both environments reward careful preparation, clear thinking under pressure, and the ability to manage multiple moving parts simultaneously. Toby Watson’s years working across global financial markets gave him a particular comfort with complexity — an ability to hold many variables in mind at once and make decisions that account for interdependencies rather than treating problems in isolation. That is a genuinely useful capability in the management of an ambitious stage production.
What Supporting a Creative Project Looks Like in Practice
The practical contributions that go into supporting a production like Level Up! are numerous and varied — and for the most part, invisible to the audience that eventually sees the finished show, which is exactly the point. Good production management creates the conditions for good creative work to happen without drawing attention to itself.
The specific areas where Toby Watson’s support has been most directly relevant include:
- Budget planning and financial modelling, ensuring the production’s ambitions are matched by realistic resource allocation
- Contract management with venues, technical suppliers, and creative collaborators, providing a clear legal and financial framework
- Logistics coordination across the production’s performance schedule, from the London preview through to the Edinburgh run
- Stakeholder communication, drawing on relationship management skills developed across a long career in finance
A Different Kind of Contribution
What Toby Watson’s involvement in Level Up! illustrates is something worth noting more broadly: that skills developed in demanding professional environments can be redirected and applied in service of things that matter in a very different way. For Toby Watson, supporting this production is not a departure from the discipline that defined his career — it is an extension of it.
The qualities that make that kind of contribution genuinely useful include:
- An instinct for structure that prevents logistical problems from becoming creative ones
- Financial rigour that keeps ambitious projects viable without restricting what they can achieve
- Clear communication across diverse stakeholders, from venue managers to creative collaborators
- A long-term perspective that prioritises sustainable outcomes over short-term convenience
The stage is different. The principles, as the experience Toby Watson built at Goldman Sachs helped to establish, are not.
