I built the show software I kept wishing for.

Who I am

I am a programmer. Building software is my job, and building things that have to work in front of an audience is the part of it I love most.

The theatre is where I do that for love. Nobody pays me to run sound there. We started as an amateur charity; some of the people on our stage are professionals now, and we have a real crew.

The nights it let the room down

For years I ran our shows on Screen Monkey. I liked it, and I still do: it was free, it was simple, and it was the right shape for a room like ours. But it was Windows software, and it froze. Mid-show. Not often enough to give up on it; often enough to stop trusting it.

I have restarted a computer between two cues, with the audience still in their seats.

If you have run a show, you know that wait: the house is quiet, the stage is waiting for a sound, and the screen in front of you will not move.

So I kept a second laptop open beside the first, loaded and ready, in case the first one froze.

Then there was Windows itself: its own sounds, and an update deciding the middle of act two was a good moment. Before every show I had a list of things to switch off, and the list was the thing I was most likely to forget.

And saving a show did not really save it. You got the layout, not the settings. The files had to sit in the right folder under exactly the right names, or the show came up empty. Handing it to somebody else meant a folder, a set of instructions, and hope.

So I built it myself

I kept wishing somebody would build the thing I needed. In the end I stopped waiting and wrote it. Almost everything in CueMonkey started as something I wished I had in the middle of a show.

The whole show is one file, with every sound, video and picture inside it. Put it on a memory stick, open it on another Mac, and it plays.

Starting a show turns the Mac’s own alert sounds down to nothing, and puts them back when you are done. There is no list to remember.

You can trim a cue where you are standing, in seconds, without touching the file. That was the thing I wanted most and never had.

And once the Mac is licensed, a booth with no signal is fine. The show does not need the internet.

How I work

I write CueMonkey myself, and I run our shows on it. When something in it is wrong, it is wrong for me, on a Saturday, in front of an audience. So I want it right as much as you do.

Every message and every request comes to me, and I read each one myself. If something is wrong for your room, tell me. There is a good chance it changes, and a good idea often turns up in the next release.

If CueMonkey ever closes without you quitting it, it says so the next time, brings the show back, and offers to send me the log of the evening. It only goes when you press Send.

CueMonkey is made at Groovy Milk, the studio I lead in Maryland. We build software and AI agents for clients, and CueMonkey is the studio’s own product, with our engineering, design and testing behind it. That is the name you will see at the foot of every page and on every invoice, and it is who the terms mean by “we”.

Why Solo is free

Screen Monkey was free, and that is why rooms like ours could have it at all. Small theatres, churches and school stages run on volunteers, borrowed kit and whatever costs nothing. Ours does too.

So Solo is free. You make an account, and that is all: no card, no trial, no watermark, no date when it stops. It runs a whole show or a whole service, with every kind of cue, as many cues as you need, every fade and every trim. The limits are about size: one layer, one act (one running order for the whole show or service), one screen for the audience and one saved venue.

Pro is for building bigger: more layers and acts, more than one screen, and a second Mac that follows the show cue by cue, ready to take over. That is what pays for the work. Schools, colleges, churches, charities and community theatres can ask us for Pro free.