Has computational creativity successfully made it 'Beyond the Fence' in musical theatre?

A significant test for software is when it is tasked with replicating human performance, as was the case recently with creative software and the commercial project Beyond the Fence (undertaken for a television documentary Computer Says Show). The remit of the Beyond the Fence project was to use computer software as much as possible to produce a musical show billed as `the world's first computer-generated musical’. Several computational creativity systems were used in the production of this musical, which was performed in London's West End for a two week run in 2016. This paper considers the challenge of evaluating this project. Current computational creativity evaluation methods are ill-suited to evaluating projects involving creative input from multiple systems and people. Following recent inspiration within computational creativity research from interaction design, here the DECIDE evaluation framework is used to evaluate the Beyond the Fence project along two questions: (1) To what extent is the project successful? and (2) To what extent does this project demonstrate computational creativity? Evaluation lets us conclude that this was a reasonably successful achievement of the task of using computational generation in producing a credible musical show. Lessons have been learned for future computational creativity projects though, particularly for affording creative software more agency and enabling software to interact with other creative partners. Upon reflection, the DECIDE framework emerges as a useful evaluation `checklist' (if not a tangible operational methodology) for the evaluation of multiple creative systems participating in a single creative task.