WHEN WILL VENUES REOPEN?
Promoters cautious about future
The bottom part of the Club Soda marquee, “Entracte,” tells a more euphemistic side of the story for this concert venue as well as all others throughout Quebec.
Yup, it’s been quite the interlude between acts for concert halls, shut down since March. Venues, from Club Soda to Place des Arts, had to cancel and/or postpone countless hundreds of shows. Promoters have taken a financial bath, actually more like dealing with a deluge. And fans have been left pining for that live-performance experience again.
“You can’t replace the experience of a live concert with a webcast, any more than you can replace a vacation with a travel video or a restaurant adventure with a food show,” opines Rubin Fogel, who with Michel Sabourin, are the owners/operators of Club Soda on the lower Main.
Fogel and Sabourin, each with 45 years of experience in the concert business, know the live-performance scene as well as anyone in the land. Neither has ever dealt with this kind of extended shutdown before. And in spite of encouraging words this week from Minister of Culture Nathalie Roy expressing confidence about reopening venues — with physical-distancing measures in place — before Fête nationale on June 24, Fogel and Sabourin feel it will still be some time before the scene returns to even near-normal.
“What kind of programming could we even offer then?” asks Sabourin, also the Fête nationale artistic director. “We have no shows for sale. It will take quite a while to book some acts and set up the club for all aspects of our operation. Then there’s the whole aspect of dealing with the physical distancing. This can’t happen overnight.
“And how many people will we be able to accommodate in the club? One-quarter, one-half? And who knows if people will even want to come back to clubs so fast?”
With standing room, Club Soda can hold 950 patrons — tightly. Table-seating capacity is about 530. But Sabourin estimates they would probably have to limit the crowd to 120. At that point, however, it would hardly be financially feasible to book most talent, without government subsidies. All the more so, if the club is unable to offer alcohol service.
“We’ve already lost about $2 million in ticket-sale revenues,” says Sabourin, while noting that sum doesn’t include what would have been considerable booze sales or what might have been coming in a normal festival season. “But who I really feel for are all those freelance technicians, security personnel and servers so dependent on us.
“At this rate, we could only continue for another few months, without government assistance. Still, I don’t think the government should be spending money to sustain concert halls and promoters to do things like streaming. Instead, it should invest in local artists, getting them ready to return to perform again. We have to focus on their future.”
Nick Farkas, Evenko’s senior vice-president in charge of booking, concerts and events, is pumped by the prospect of having live music return. The last three months have been a nightmare, with lights out and too many cancellations/postponements/reschedulings to count at the Bell Centre, Place Bell in Laval, Mtelus, L’astral and Corona.
“Reopening these venues will be under the strictest of safety guidelines,” Farkas says. “The biggest challenge will be to keep the two-metre distancing, and with that, the capacities of all our rooms will drop 75 to 85 per cent at least.
“So to open Mtelus, which holds 2,300 but only being able to sell a fraction of that number of tickets, the business model becomes incredibly challenging. Obviously, being used to doing multiple shows every day and having done none and having no revenue for three months, we can’t wait to get back. It’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
“Of course, we can’t be operating full-steam without the James Taylors and Elton Johns. But I foresee a gradual return to business with more Quebec and Canadian acts. And what better way to put the spotlight on them?”
Who I really feel for are all those freelance technicians, security personnel and servers so dependent on us.