Theater District is ready for comeback a year after Harvey
Crews race to finish repairs for arts companies in need of a good season to help recover losses
Houston’s major ballet, opera, symphony and theater companies have never been as anxious to begin a season as they are heading into this fall.
A year after Hurricane Harvey devastated two venues, damaged several more and hobbled most of the 17-block Theater District downtown, they are weary of reworking schedules, moving productions, pleading with donors for recovery funds and coaxing audiences to stick with them through the hardest year of their histories.
They need a good season, and they’re thrilled to be returning to normal. Sort of.
All of the district’s seven resident companies lost revenue and momentum. Even though some groups were back on stage within two months after the storm, the district’s streets and some of its facilities were a mess for months.
The Wortham Center, the district’s largest and most damaged venue, is home to Houston Grand Opera, Houston Ballet, Da Camera and many Society for the Performing Arts events. It remains a work in progress.
While the situation has vastly improved across the board, even less-impacted companies do not expect a full recovery this season.
Or even next year.
Disaster recovery for an arts organization’s bottom line is not a one-year problem, said Perryn Leech, the opera’s managing director. “It’s a three-year problem.”
With pro-bono help from the consulting firm PwC, several Houston organizations have written recovery forecasts based on donor pledges that will erase most, but not all, of their losses across three fiscal cycles. They’ve had to shift priorities as a result.
For example, the opera may actually have a surplus this season but opted not to produce a holiday show; a decision Leech said was “a shame, but the right thing to do.” He said he preferred to push those funds forward, toward the December 2019 premiere of a prequel to “Cruzar la Cara de la Luna,” the popular mariachi opera.
Competition for philanthropic support, never a skate, has been tougher since Harvey. Houston Symphony lost $1.6 million in ticket sales after canceling performances at Jones Hall for seven weeks, but also lost $1.8 million in gifts. Executive director and CEO John Mangum said many donors instead supported the Red Cross.
“We’re trying to see how many of those people will return,” he said. “I think by the time we reach 2020, 2021, we’ll be back.”
Theater Under The Stars, which performs at the Hobby Center, lost about $2.1 million with canceled events and reduced donations, said executive director Hillary Hart.
Toni Capra, executive director of Da Camera, said Sarah Rothenberg’s jazz and classical music company lost about 15 percent of its contributed revenue, primarily because its gala didn’t meet projections.
“We were one of the lucky ones,” she added. “We were displaced, more than anything.”
While ticket sales only account for a small percentage of nonprofit arts revenue, the companies need to meet every dollar of their revised goals to produce new works and maintain their size and artistic standards.
That gives next Sunday’s 25th annual Theater District Open House, the traditional season kickoff, an unusual element of urgency. “It’s a day where they have people’s attention,” said Kathryn McNiel, the district’s CEO. “We need to see if the audience comes back this fall. That’s a big unknown.”
Ballet ticket sales are tracking 15 percent behind executive director Jim Nelson’s goals. The upside is a longer sales cycle than normal, he said, because the company pushed its Wortham season to February, correctly anticipating that the venue’s Brown Theater would not be ready for the ballet’s usual opening date of the first Thursday in September.
The compressed regular schedule has slightly fewer performances than normal, although “The Nutcracker” returns on schedule, in late November. This all seems a far cry better to Nelson than last season, when the ballet lost 30 percent of its planned performances, the most of any of the district’s companies.
Advance sales for Society for the Performing Arts’ intentionally safe season are on track, after a slow start last spring, said interim executive director Leslie Nelson. “Ticket sales have been increasing every week, and we are hopeful that the open house will continue to build the momentum.” Shifting gears after Harvey
In 2001, bayou overflow from Tropical Storm Allison decimated the basements of the Alley, the Wortham and Jones Hall. The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts wasn’t yet finished. The Houston Ballet Center for Dance wasn’t yet built.
Everyone knew it was worse this time.
Shiela Turkiewicz, the theater division chief of Houston First, which manages the city’s downtown entertainment venues, experienced Harvey’s drama as it unfolded. She was on emergency duty at the Wortham on that drenched morning last August.
She had spent the night there, and at 6 a.m. Turkiewicz was horrified by what she saw even in the darkness, through the plate glass windows of the building’s security vestibule. Buffalo Bayou was lapping the bottom of the Preston Street Bridge, a half block away. Within 30 minutes, the flood barrier at the center’s loading dock looked like a spillway.
All Turkeiwicz and her crew could do was document the scene and get out of the way as water also slid under the backstage doors and flowed down hallways, over the center’s large Brown Theater stage and into the basement. By 11 a.m., with the power out, they waded two blocks to the drier Jones Hall. Then the power went out there, forcing a full retreat to the George R. Brown Convention Center.
Leech, McNiel, Jim Nelson and others waded into the district Monday, astonished by the devastation, distressed and soon frustrated as well.
Houston First officials, worried about liabilities, locked tenants out of Jones Hall and the Wortham until they could assess mold and air quality issues. They also were overwhelmed with other priorities: Thousands of Houstonians were sheltering at the convention center, worried about basic survival.
No one complained about that, but weeks passed while Gilbane crews pumped water from the flooded buildings and performing arts groups frantically tried to shift gears, not knowing how long repairs would take. Remediation lasted through December at the Wortham, before the even slower process of reconstruction could begin. Jones Hall, with less severe basement flooding, also was shut for nearly two months.
The Alley Theatre, which owns its own building next door to the Wortham, fared the worst financially, claiming a setback of $22 million. Its basement, like the Wortham’s, flooded to the rafters, forcing a gutting and complete rebuild of the intimate Neuhaus Theatre. That work was completed by January, so the Alley was back in business, artistically speaking, for the entire second half of last season.
Houston Grand Opera and Houston Ballet suffered less, financially — $15 million and $14 million, respectively — but struggled more and longer.
To keep contracts with its guest artists and avoid losing performance dates, the opera quickly built its own temporary space, the Resilience Theater, at the George R. Brown Convention Center. But its costumes and wardrobe studios in the Wortham basement were a total loss. This week the wig and costume-making operation moves permanently to an East End warehouse, another expense. The opera also was shut out of its offices on the Wortham’s upper floors; they’re finally moving back at the end of this month.
The ballet’s nomadic “hometown tour” required significant program changes, performance losses and box office and marketing adjustments. The company also had repair and future flood mitigation expenses at its Center for Dance near the Wortham. Flooding on that facility’s first floor ruined floors and walls in the lobby, a dance studio and a black box theater. The storm also damaged the roof of the ballet’s Fifth Wardarea warehouse, where all of its sets and props are stored.
Except for the construction trailers on Fish Plaza at the Wortham’s front door, visitors to the open house and the season’s first performances will find public areas looking virtually unchanged. With one caveat: The district’s massive underground parking garage, which held 290 million gallons of mucky, putrid water, is cleaned up but still dimly lit and unpainted, and the tunnel from the garage into the Wortham will not reopen until November.
Coming out stronger
Leech, Jim Nelson, McNiel and others said they appreciate Houston First’s diligence in restoring the district’s facilities as quickly as possible.
“We would like for a magic wand to be waved and it be ready,” Leech said.
Turkiewicz is pleased that the status report she presents to stakeholders monthly now fills three pages instead of just one: That means progress is happening faster.
She ran down part of the list: Permanent power has been on two weeks — “a really big deal.” Air-handler units in the basement have been re-energized. Janitors are now cleaning up the main Texas Avenue lobby in preparation for the open house. Elevators that were damaged have been replaced, with the exception of two ADA lifts still under repair. The box office tenants are moving back into completely redone rooms on Monday.
“We always knew it was a very short time frame,” Turkiewicz said. “So everybody’s working hard-hard-hard, fast-fast-fast.”
Wednesday, people in hard hats, safety vests and steel-toed boots moved swiftly and purposefully across the Wortham’s Brown Theater stage in a tightly choreographed dance against time. Part of a crew of about 200 from Manhattan Construction that’s working seven days a week, 18 hours a day except on Sundays, they are hurrying to open the Wortham’s large theater by Sept. 26, when the opera plans to stage a seasonopening gala starring Placido Domingo.
Another crew that day was ensuring that water flowed through the toilets — all 130 have been replaced. The smell of fresh plaster and paint permeated the building, a far more pleasant and hopeful thing than last fall’s mold odors.
Because the basement will not be finished until May, some of the opera and ballet performers will use makeshift dressing rooms for most of this season.
“We know how to do temporary dressing rooms now,” said Leech. “It’s not ideal, but none of it has been ideal.”
Houston First opted not to make cosmetic changes or redesign the Wortham’s 30-year-old public areas. “We just moved as quickly as we could to get it back to the way it was,” Turkiewicz said, also noting that such updates would not have been reimbursed.
Houston First is spending $100 million on building remediation, repairs and rebuilding, mostly at the Wortham; and $70 million on the garage. Turkiewicz said the company has received some insurance monies but has not yet learned what FEMA will pay for theater district repairs. “We’ll know when we get the check,” she said.
The Alley and the ballet also are still expecting FEMA payments.
Ask Leech how the opera is doing now, and he quickly retorts, “Do you mean emotionally, physically or financially?”
Artists and staff are exhausted, but also enthusiastic and less likely to be finicky. They are survivors who have made it to the other side, together, Leech said. “Organizations come out very different organizations, but much stronger.”
Stronger flood mitigation measures are in place, or being designed, across the district. But how many flood barriers will be needed, and how high will they need to be, and what potentially unseen potential gaps need to be tightened to prevent the next disaster in a perennially vulnerable area?
Gladden, the Alley Theatre’s managing director, fears the bayou has been compromised by layers of flood silt still under its surface. That could mean it holds 30 percent less water than it did last year, potentially making the next flood worse, he said.
And what might happen if the next bad storm brings devastating winds instead of rain? No one wants to imagine that.