‘Win-win-win-win’ for series in New York
With its month-long Soulpepper on 42nd Street season, the Torontobased company gambled big — and won big. And its artistic director, Albert Schultz, says he’s ready to do it again.
“I can say at this point there was no lose. This was a win-win-win-winwin,” Schultz says in his first major media interview since arriving back from Manhattan.
Schultz has been wanting to make international connections for the company for a number of years, but attempts to invite producers and artistic directors to Toronto were largely unsuccessful. Trying to have their work invited to international festivals would have involved disentangling one or two shows from their repertory — a very complicated prospect.
And so the big idea became, “Why don’t we skip those steps? . . . Why don’t we find a way to invite ourselves to New York?”
The company brought 12 productions to the Pershing Square Signature Centre on 42nd Street in an undertaking that cost $2.5 million. A tenth of this was hived off from Soulpepper’s annual budget, the rest put together through government grants and private sponsorship — some of which they had in hand, some of which they had to raise.
The key factor was New York as an “aspirational centre” for theatre, Schultz says. It opened donors’ pockets, it “got the media interested; it’s what got the artists excited.”
They branded the season as a festival celebrating Canada 150, and targeted serious local theatregoers and the theatre industry rather than tourists — the latter group being, Schultz says, “out of our reach. We didn’t have the marketing budget.”
Things initially looked rocky, Schultz now reveals: They had only hit 10 per cent of their box-office target when the festival opened on Canada Day.
Houses built steadily over the first two weeks of the festival, in part through good word-of-mouth. But the pivot point was surely positive attention from the New York Times, which gave Of Human Bondage and Spoon River great reviews and two of its coveted “Critics Picks.” Asked to isolate the moment when he knew things were turning in the company’s favour, Schultz recalls seeing the Times’ chief theatre reporter and its arts editor at a performance of Spoon River before Ben Brantley’s review had run.
“I thought, there’s a buzz back in the office.” Sure enough, Brantley’s positive review with Critics Pick attached went online later that night, and a couple of days later, the show was completely sold out.
It was the patriotic angle that hooked Jim Nicola, artistic director of New York Theatre Workshop — “that it was about presenting the artistic expression of a proud coun- try celebrating its existence.” Nicola saw Of Human Bondage and came back to see Spoon River twice. He calls Soulpepper’s work “superb,” and says that some kind of engagement between his organization and Soulpepper will result from this encounter.
While amongst the biggest affirmations provided by the season is of Schultz as an artist — he directed Of Human Bondage and co-created and directed Spoon River — he bristles at the suggestion that the venture was about him (or, as the Globe and Mail asked in a preview piece, whether this was mostly “an ego trip”).
He points to a motto handwritten on a piece of paper taped above his desk. “I am a very good front person and ringleader for an organization whose mission is to give meaningful creative experiences to the maximum number of artists, and meaningful creative and civic engagement to audiences.”
Believing that this could work — and not apologizing for believing that — are clearly vitally important to him: He draws comparison to the “Own the Podium” campaign around the Vancouver Olympics, which he says made some Canadians uncomfortable because the country was both hosting and saying it wanted to win big.
“There’s nothing bad in wanting to win in sports. Nor should we judge ourselves because we want to have our work to register on an international level.”
While the final numbers are still being tallied, Schultz is reasonably confident the season will pay for itself: because box-office targets were in the end exceeded (the season played to 76-per-cent capacity overall), they should be able to put the 10 per cent allotted for the season back into the overall budget.
Members of the company that I spoke to said the experience was intense and tiring: In addition to sometimes performing in multiple shows a day, there were also afterhouse cabaret performances that went on into the night.
Production stage manager Robert Harding flew back from New York and started prepping for the new Toronto season on the same day. But the success of the season “felt right and validating and rejuvenating,” Harding says.
“I saw some great work in New York, and our work stood up against that,” says Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster, a member of the acting ensemble.
And is Schultz considering a similar followup? “Yes. I think so. We need to figure out a plan.” Karen Fricker is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with Carly Maga.