‘BEAST’ hits the road to showcase company’s ‘BEAUTY’
Arizona Broadway Theatre harnesses Disney classic to help expand audience
KERRY LENGEL
Most people aren’t willing to drive more than 10 or 20 miles to attend the performing arts. So Arizona Broadway Theatre, the big west-side dinner theater, is taking a tip from an old proverb: If the mountain will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the mountain. h More prosaically, the Peoria theater is taking its latest musical production, Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,” to the Herberger Theater Center in Phoenix for a two-weekend run July 7-16. It’s part of an effort by the
See BEAST, Page 5D
‘Beauty and the Beast’
When: Friday, July 7, through Sunday, July 16.
Where: Herberger Theater Center, 222 E. Monroe St., Phoenix.
Admission: $37.50-$77.50.
Details: 602-252-8497,
company to expand its audience and its brand.
“We’re kind of a young company, we’re not in the central core of Phoenix, and for us to get our name in a wider market is very valuable to us so we become more relevant in the arts scene, not just to the 100,000 patrons who happen to live in Sun City,” said executive director Kiel Klaphake.
Arizona Broadway began a co-producing relationship with the Herberger — sharing risk and box-office revenue — last fall with a musical version of “A Christmas Carol.” It’s the kind of collaboration that many nonprofit arts organizations are pursuing to keep their balance books healthy in a tough marketplace.
For the Herberger, the arrangement helps fill seats after the loss of one of its key resident companies, Actors Theatre, which left the venue in 2013 and closed the following year.
“We had wonderful response from the community,” Klaphake said. “They were very interested in follow-up years to come see ‘A Christmas Carol’ over and over. … Now we have people in a wider market of Phoenix recognizing that the product we create has value. It might be that they’re willing to drive out here (to Peoria) eventually, or they want to support more programming at the Herberger.”
“Christmas Carol” will return this year, and Klaphake said more productions are in the works.
“We’re talking about what potential shows they’d like to see down there, what the market would be interested in, and how we can perhaps modify our season programming to accommodate the needs of the Herberger,” he said.
Arizona Broadway Theatre debuted in late 2005, although construction delays forced its first production, “Anything Goes,” into an outdoor pavilion. It started as a forprofit company, but in 2008 it transferred theater operations to a new nonprofit corporation, while Klaphake retained his private company, which owns the building and provides catering services.
“We always wanted to start as a nonprofit,” Klaphake said, “but we quickly learned that it was really impractical for us to launch it that way, because the ability to raise the capital necessary to build the building would not happen without many, many years of performing in church basements and working your way up to finally building that level of community support and then raising a huge capital campaign. … The only way to do it was to organize as an LLC, raise private investors, get conventional bank loans and, you know, sign your life away to mortgages.”
Klaphake said that the Herberger’s brand is more important than Arizona Broadway’s in drawing theatergoers from, say, Chandler — “They don’t know us from Adam anyway” — but there’s still more to gain from the relationship than extra ticket sales.
“Some of the efforts we’re trying to make as we cultivate donors and sponsors and board members and granting, because we’re not in the mainstream, we’ve had difficulty building some of those relationships,” he said. “We’re very isolated out here. And so the more that we can build a strong working relationship with other arts organizations … then we can be successful.”