Report touting Houston’s live-theater rank fails to look backstage
The headline was enticing, to say the least: “Houston/Galveston rank among top ten best places for live theater in U.S.”
The statement came from the Actors’ Equity Union, the nation’s top union for professional stage actors. It had just released, for the first time, a comprehensive study of union theater work across the country, comparing membership and workweeks in such a way that placed Houston ninth in the “2018 Regional Theatre Report.”
That Houston could be considered a top 10 theater city, of course, isn’t immediately surprising. The Bayou City is often touted as the country’s fourthlargest city, a place that trumpets its cuisine and culture and worldclass performing-arts organizations.
But a closer look at Houston’s theater market shows the statement is incomplete. The AEA ranking is aimed toward actors, measuring the average number of weeks an AEA member works in a given year. The ranking also excludes Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, which means that ranking of ninth is actually 12th.
In fact, given the total number of professional acting workweeks during the 2016-17 season and including all American cities, the city sits at No. 20 — below St. Louis, Minneapolis/ St. Paul, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Seattle. Houston barely beats out Pittsburgh.
In other words, though unionized actors have relatively good job opportunities in Houston, the city is home to less live theater than is staged in many other cities of comparable size — including markets that are smaller.
During the 2016-17 season, AEA counted a total of 2,813 workweeks in Houston/ Galveston. Compare that to Dallas/Ft. Worth’s 3,287, Seattle’s 5,419 and Minneapolis/ St. Paul’s 6,851.
In terms of total union membership, Houston ranks 21st.
It’s a sobering reminder of the work the city still has to do to become a national contender in the arts. And begs the question: Why isn’t Houston ranked higher?
“If you look at central Florida, Minneapolis/St. Paul, St. Louis and others in the top 5, one of the things all those regions have is strong local, state and arts funding,” suggests Brandon Lorenz, communications director for AEA, who contributed to the report.
Texas has one of the lowest commitments to the arts, ranking 49th out of 50 states for per capita spending on state arts agencies, according a 2018 report by the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies.
But public funding isn’t the only barrier to Houston’s cultural growth, says Leah Binkovitz, senior editor at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research. Binkovitz, who is a former Houston Chronicle reporter, compared her arts-going experience in Houston with that of other major cities.
“My arts experience in New York and D.C. was often through happenstance. A robust transit network and a density to support it meant I could stumble upon arts happenings,” she says. “You have to be much more deliberate about arts here. That speaks to the difference between a Houston and a New York.”
Data support her claim that urban sprawl is a major hurdle to arts-going in cities. The problem extends beyond serendipitous encounters with art in arts hubs — even when Houston residents know about an organization’s events, they often choose not to attend because venues are too hard to get to. Roughly 36 percent of Houstonians cite traffic or transportation problems as a major reason they chose not to attend arts events, according to a 2012 Kinder Institute survey on the arts in Houston.
For example, compare Houston to a smaller market such as Minneapolis/St. Paul, the country’s 14th-largest metro area. Hillary Hart, who was managing director at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis before being hired as executive director of Theatre Under The Stars, says strong public support and robust public transit dramatically boosted the arts scene in the Twin Cities.
“Minneapolis has a very proactive and almost aggressive stance when it comes to greenspace, pedestrian-friendly environments and public transportation,” she says.
Hart noted projects in Houston such as the rerouting of Interstate 45 and the Theater District Master Plan as examples of potential “intentional infrastructure” supporting the arts.
Looking only at acting work done through the national union is, of course, an incomplete way to quantify the size of Houston’s theater industry. Plenty of professional theater companies, including the Catastrophic Theatre, rarely use unionized actors yet often present productions that draw national media attention. Theaters such as the Catastrophic aren’t accounted for in the AEA study.
But studies using different metrics for ranking arts scenes also place Houston as struggling to be a top arts city. A 2015 Boston Foundation study revealed Houston lags behind most of the country’s “top 10” cities. Of the 10 cities studied, Houston ranked last in arts organizations per capita and second to last (above Baltimore) in per capita arts spending.
Houston fails to make the list of top 20 cities in the National Center for Arts Research’s 2017 arts-vibrancy index, which tracks independent artists and arts organizations per capita. Houston is beaten out by cities such as Rochester, N.Y., Richmond, Va., and Newark, N.J.
In other words: When it comes to how many arts groups we have and how much money is in the arts industry, Houston punches below its weight class.
But local actor Joel Sandel says that doesn’t mean Houstonians aren’t interested in the arts. Rather, he says, these statistics position Houston as ripe for growth.
“I started working here professionally in 1987,” says Sandel, who is also the city’s liaison for AEA. “The growth in that period of time has been phenomenal.”
A 2012 study by the Houston Arts Alliance that included projections through 2016 backs up Sandel’s point. The report stated that Houston’s arts industry is smaller than it should be, but it’s also been growing since 2001 at a higher rate than most major cities.
“In other words, we are growing rapidly, but other, sometimes smaller, cities still have larger sectors than ours,” said the report, titled “The Creative Economy of Houston.”
“One reason is likely perception. … Houston has an opportunity to redefine itself as a modern, forward-thinking, creative-industry center in the eyes of the world community. By honing that image, Houston as the energy capital can also become the global hub for creative energy,” the report said.
Sandel agrees that perception of Houston’s artistic challenges needs to catch up to the reality that the city is poised for major growth. Sure, in the late ’80s and ’90s, he says, equity work for actors existed at only three companies: the Alley Theatre, TUTS and Stages Repertory Theatre. But the past decades have seen a boom in professional theater work.
Two of Houston’s professional theaters, after all, have recently signed a major union contract: A.D. Players and Queensbury Theatre. The two theaters are more than new employers of professional union actors in Houston. Both companies also sport relatively new and large venues and increased seating capacity — a potential growth area for consumers.
But Hart says that growth won’t be easy without the rest of the city behind the arts.
“The (theater) market is potentially huge, but it requires meaningful investment in terms of funding. It also requires real integration in municipal planning,” she says. “It’s important to find ways to integrate arts and culture into broader city planning.” wchen@chron.com twitter.com/weihuanchen