Shaw plans to stage comeback from chilly 2015
After $1.76M loss, theatre plans to broaden audience with ambitious 2016 season
Last season, the Shaw Festival lost $1.76 million and saw its three mainstage shows dramatically underperform. Somehow, organizers had only one piece of cold comfort: things could have been much worse.
“They could have posted something much closer to a $3.5-million deficit,” conceded executive director Tim Jennings, who was hired last fall. “The staff here did a really good job of mitigating damage in a very difficult year.”
With Jackie Maxwell’s final season as artistic director set to begin April 9 with Our Town at the Royal George Theatre, Shaw is determined to stage a comeback.
So what went wrong? Last year’s $31.5-million budget was “aspirational,” Jennings said, with an expected attendance rise actually moving the other way (232,671 attendees compared to 249,000-plus a year before).
The primary issue was the three productions headlining Shaw’s marquee 856-seat Festival Theatre: Moss Hart’s 1948 comedy Light Up the Sky; the1966 musical Sweet Charity; and Peter Hinton’s modern interpretation of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. The 237 performances of those three shows played at 63 per cent capacity to a total audience of 126,879.
Even though Shaw’s three smaller venues thrived with such critically celebrated fare as Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide and Michel Marc Bouchard’s The Divine, the festival simply couldn’t overcome its tepid mainstage returns.
“Every single problem we had was a result of that ticket shortfall,” Jen- nings said.
In particular, the Niagara-on-the-Lake festival hurt for Toronto tourists, whom Jennings believes were distracted by an unusually entertaining summer headlined by the Pan Am Games and the streaking Blue Jays.
Still, Shaw has reigned in its budget, freezing wages, taking “resources away from every department in the building ” and creating a more grounded budget forecast.
Jennings is also bullish on the programming, which includes Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and a presentation of Alice in Wonderland that will “blow people’s minds.”
“It’s one of the most ambitious projects I’ve seen in 30-plus years,” Jennings enthused. “It’s totally accessible, whether you’re 8 or 80.”
That last point is crucial as Shaw examines, with renewed enthusi- asm, how to broaden its audience.
Where typical Shaw attendees once preferred multiple-day, multiple-show visits, Jennings says Shaw now serves 30 per cent more households, but each one is buying fewer tickets.
With that new preponderance of single-ticket buyers, the continent’s second-largest repertory theatre company has had to vigorously reconsider its advertising strategy.
“We’re competing with the Mirvishes, commercial theatres, sports and concerts,” Jennings reflected.
To that end, Jennings says the company has tripled its TV advertising and intensified its digital-media presence.
Dignified old Shaw has even started advertising on buses and doing things that “frankly, Shaw doesn’t normally do,” Jennings said.
It’s symptomatic of what feels like an ongoing identity crisis for nonprofit theatre companies.
“We and the rest of the non-profit world need to think about . . . our relationship to commercial theatre. In the 21st century, how are we different from the Mirvishes?” he mused.
“Most of the Broadway shows are a lot more like what we used to be. Something like Fun Home or Hamilton, those shows at a certain point in history would never have been Broadway fare.
“God love us, non-profit theatres have trained audiences to like that kind of work, so they go see it commercially now. So we have to differentiate ourselves again.”