Choice down to 3 for manager
City expects to make a decision by end of the month
The city of Cohoes this week will interview three companies named as finalists in the competition to manage the Cohoes Music Hall, winnowed from six initial applicants.
They are Music Hall Arts Alliance, founded by the music hall’s current executive director, Holly Brown, to manage the city-owned venue starting at the beginning of 2018; Playhouse Stage Company, which has produced musicals there for several years and also had contracts with the city for free outdoor shows and school performances; and Albany-based Guthrie/bell Productions, veterans of more than 25 years in the local concert scene.
The interviews are to take place Thursday, according to an announcement from the city. Mayor Bill Keeler, an advisory panel appointed to manage the selection process, administration officials and Cohoes Common Council President Bill Mccarthy will conduct the interviews, the announcement said, adding that a winner will be chosen and presented to the Common Council for approval by the end of this month, when the city’s contacts with Musical Hall Arts Alliance and Playhouse Stage expire.
Greg Bell, co-founder of Guthrie/bell Productions, cited his company’s 28 years of booking shows in the region, including about two dozen concerts at the Cohoes Music Hall in recent years, as the primary reason it ultimately should be selected.
“What they’ve been doing there has been great,” he said, referring to Musical Hall Arts Alliance and Playhouse Stage, “but I think we’d bring in a lot more variety for audiences.” If awarded the management contract, Bell said Guthrie/bell would continue work with Playhouse Stage to host the company’s musicals at the music hall during the fall-to-spring season, when the longtime home of its Park Playhouse wing, at the lakehouse amphitheater in Albany’s Washington Park, is unsuitable.
Owen Smith, producing artistic director of Playhouse Stage Company, said advantages of PSC becoming the managing entity for the music hall are the six shows annually it has produced at the hall and his own six years as managing director of the Palace Theatre in Albany. Smith also pointed to Playhouse Stage’s full staff, who have experience running the lakehouse amphitheater and some of whom also worked with Smith at the Palace, programming shows brought in by outside promoters. Further, Smith said, PSC already has directors of development and education who could be beneficial to the future of the music hall.
“We’re glad to be considered in the next step in this process, and we’ve been very pleased with the professionalism with which the city has run things so far,” Smith said.
Brown did not immediately return a message seeking comment. She has run the music hall since fall 2016, when she was executive director of the Palace Theatre, working with Smith as managing director, and the Palace was contracted by Cohoes to revive the floundering hall. A year later, after Brown left the Palace, Cohoes canceled the Palace contract and struck a new management deal, taking effect at the beginning of 2018, with Brown’s newly established Musical Hall Arts Alliance company.
In late April, citing ballooning deficit in the city budget and the approximately $200,000 combined annual cost of the MHAA and Playhouse Stage contracts, the Common Council approved the Keeler administration’s request to exercise a 90-day cancellation clause in the contracts.
The abruptness of the intent to cancel the contracts, announced less than a week before the vote, stunned Brown and Smith. They said they learned of the move only a day before the public and without being given the opportunity to renegotiate their current deals. Between them, Brown and Smith over the past several years revitalized the programming of a building that had been dark for two years prior and foundering for long before that. MHAA and Playhouse Stage together were responsible for 132 event nights at the music hall in 2019. A renewed music hall, in which the city has invested about $1 million over the past several years, has been widely credited by newer restaurants and other businesses as the reason they chose to open in the city.
But the Keeler administration decided music hall contracts were unsustainably expensive as city revenue plummeted, including income missing from the temporarily closed venue’s nonexistent ticket sales.
“All six proposals would have continued the long tradition of quality programming at the Cohoes Music Hall, while saving the taxpayers in excess of a $200,000 annually,” Keeler said. “Whichever of these finalists is chosen, there will be two big winners: the arts community and the taxpayer.” He said none of the finalists’ proposals require taxpayer-funded facility-management fees.
The three applicants not invited to present this week are the Hall, from Niskayuna; Lopolito, from Monroe, in Orange County; and Just Imagine, from Rensselaer. The Hall proposal was from from Tommy Nicchi, owner of The Comedy Works, with clubs in Saratoga Springs and Las Vegas, and of The Comedy Works’ parent, a promotions and management company called Stand-up Global. It was not immediately clear who was behind the others.
The selection committee is co-chaired by Ralph Pascale, owner of Spendwood School of Dance in Cohoes, and Salvatore Prizio, who oversaw the music hall’s programming and is now program and event manager for Proctors in Schenectady. Others include people “in theater management, arts education, youth theater, hospitality management, dance, small business ownership and municipal finance,” the city has said.