Like any impresario, longtime Salt Lake City theater presenter John Ballard wants to expand his business.
"To grow significantly, we really need a new theater," says Ballard, head of the Utah office of Live Nation, promoters of the Broadway Across America series. "We need more capacity, more good seats to sell and more time in theaters to book shows."
The privately owned entertainment company wants to be the anchor tenant in a proposed downtown cultural arts district, and Ballard's argument surely sounds familiar to anyone following Real Salt Lake's push for a taxpayer-built soccer arena.
He says Utah theatergoers have put themselves on the map, thanks to enthusiastic turnouts for musicals such as "Les Miserables," which has had eight separate Salt Lake City runs since 1989. "Cameron Mackintosh definitely knows where Salt Lake City is," he says about the legendary British producer responsible for such shows as "Les Miserables," "Cats" and "Miss Saigon."
Ballard, 58, has been presenting shows in Utah since the 1980s, launching the locally owned Theater League of Utah in 1990 to present touring Broadway shows. The company in 2001 became part of Clear Channel, the national broadcasting and entertainment conglomerate that owns seven Utah radio stations and two TV stations, including KTVX. Live Nation split off from the broadcasting company last year, and owns, operates and books shows in 150 venues worldwide.
As a member of the League of American Theatres and Producers, Ballard is one of 763 voters for Broadway's annual Tony awards, the only voter from Utah.
Planning for future arts patrons, he claims, is like building airports. "You always want to have some excess capacity," Ballard says. "We need room to grow. This is a fast-growing market."
But that take on market demand is at odds with producers at Salt Lake City's nonprofit theater companies, which are supported in part with Salt Lake County's Zoo, Arts and Parks tax. In line with national trends, local ticket sales have dropped or stayed respectably flat over the past year, and producers say they'd rather see more butts in existing seats before building bigger, taxpayer-supported facilities.
For competitive reasons, Ballard won't disclose the number of subscribers to the company's annual Broadway series, but he claims the market is at capacity because of theater size.
To illustrate, the promoter recounts a recent conversation in an ongoing drive to bring "The Lion King" to a Salt Lake City stage. "I get the same thing each time we ask: 'Well, we can't make enough money there,' '' Ballard says a booking agent told him about the show that is already scheduled through 2008.
To play in a Salt Lake-sized theater, producers would require higher ticket prices than the local office has ever charged, possibly in the range of $100. But that's just a guess, because the touring show hasn't yet played in venues as small as the Capitol Theatre.
"We're not talking about a specific season. We haven't even gotten to that," Ballard says. "I've been trying for four years to get 'Lion King' in here, and I think eventually we'll get it, but I have no idea when."
Plans mostly on paper: For years, civic leaders have talked about attractions that might bring more people downtown at night, envisioning a cluster oftheaters and entertainment venues adjacent to convenient restaurants and parking. As Salt Lake County Commissioner Randy Horiuchi explains the urgency: "The only real hope for downtown is establishing it as the arts and entertainment district for the state." The talk turned more serious last year, with the release of a report from the Chicago-based HVS Convention, Sports and Entertainment Facilities Consulting, which proposed building taxpayer-funded facilities, including several small black-box theaters, while renovating Main Street's historic Utah Theatre into a mid-sized theater. The district's centerpiece would be a 2,400-seat venue, which Horiuchi affectionately terms the "big-ass theater."
After all, the new theater could be built with seats large enough to accommodate supersized patrons, as well as enough seats to attract blockbuster Broadway spectaculars. Currently, Salt Lake County's Capitol Theatre and the University of Utah's Kingsbury Hall aren't big enough to host the largest Broadway shows, so the state's capital city serves as a placeholder location for tours heading to larger Western cities, such as Denver, Seattle or Los Angeles.
Ballard's company most often presents touring shows at the Capitol, where only half of the 1,900 seats have good sightlines. Kingsbury, which was renovated in 1996, offers about the same number of seats with better sightlines, but the stage isn't high enough for some larger sets. Even bigger problems for potential patrons, Ballard says, are the lack of adjacent drive-up parking and an uphill walk from nearby restaurants on 1300 East.
There's also the issue of not enough bathrooms at the Capitol, a concern for the Live Nation audience, which like theater audiences across the country, includes a majority of women aged 35-54.
"My wife is a specialist in urinary incontinence," Ballard says, so he hears complaints about the issue at work and home.
Not a unified theory: Officials at local theater companies question the rosy projections in the consultants' report, which estimates Salt Lake City's musical theater needs are so underserved that it would take an additional 120 musical theater performances annually, representing an attendance of 252,000, to feed arts patrons.
That number seems higher than a Cirque Du Soleil high-wire act to local arts groups who are struggling to sell existing seats. What the consultants weren't asked to address is how much growth would represent "cannibalizing existing companies," as Pioneer Theatre Company's Chris Lino phrases it, "and how much represents new growth."
At Pioneer, the city's largest professional theater company, subscriber ticket sales dropped 17 percent in the past year, from 6,800 to 5,600, though producers are optimistic that sales for the upcoming season, bookended by the blockbuster musicals "Chicago" and "Les Miserables," will bounce back to 2004-05 levels.
Pioneer officials are interested in someday launching a second-stage season of contemporary and new plays in a 350-seat theater. If that venue were downtown, great.
"We have no use for a 2,500-seat theater," Lino says, "and we're not aware of anybody else, except Broadway Across America-Utah, that has a use for it. You have to ask the question: Should a facility built primarily for the use of a commercial entity be built with public funds?"
"Would we consider participating in a new, exciting cultural arts district? Yeah," says Richard Scott, artistic director at the Grand Theatre, which is located at Salt Lake Community College's South City campus. "Would we have the dollars to do that? I don't know."
The Grand's neighborhood isn't noted as an artistic destination, and Scott jokes that the company is considering selling two-for-one tickets to patrons who can display a tattoo from a nearby State Street shop.
The company's annual subscriber base is about 2,500, selling about 700 or 800 seats to its biggest shows. Rather than expansion, Scott says the company is considering plans to make the 1,100-seat college auditorium, circa 1948, seem smaller and more intimate.
At Salt Lake Acting Co., producers say their image is closely tied to their funky remodeled church building and cozy 160-seat theater in the Marmalade Hill district, and they're not eyeing a move downtown. Ticket sales in the past year hit a plateau and dropped about 5 percent, managing director David Kirk Chambers says.
At the popular family-friendly Hale Centre Theatre, the company's slate of musicals and comedies often reaches capacity at its 530-seat theater, but producers remain happily married to both the theater-in-the-round staging and their $8 million West Valley City venue, which opened in 1998.
A fight for quality: In many ways, talk of building taxpayer funded arts venues is similar to the economic-development drives that have prompted cities to build convention-center expansions and world-class sports stadiums. Sports promoters and cultural arts administrators share similar concerns about the oversaturation of the
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Salt Lake City market compared with markets with comparable population and income. "At a certain level," Lino says, "we're all going after the same thing: the ever-shrinking entertainment dollar."
Yet the arts function without scoreboards, and the issue of quality is difficult to quantify when talking about future audience size. At every level of live theater, from volunteer-led community playhouses to professional regional companies that hire union actors, stagehands and directors, shows can vary in quality.
Some cultural critics equate bus-and-truck touring shows with chain-restaurant franchises and say that while the shows might carry the Broadway name, they are usually missing the star-quality talent. A city's regional theater companies might be compared with locally distinctive bistros, which rely on homegrown ingredients, actors and sometimes new plays, all of which can embody local stories. What's also difficult to quantify is future supply, because tours are dependent on the buzz emanating from Broadway. In an era of jukebox musicals, where large-scale productions have relied on popular soundtracks but slight storylines, some theater-lovers question how many more innovative shows like "Urinetown" or "Wicked" are in the for-profit pipeline.
This season, for example, "Lestat," the $12 million Broadway spectacle based on Anne Rice's popular vampire novels and an Elton John-Bernie Taupin score, died quickly after receiving scorching reviews. And in Las Vegas, two Tony Award-winning musicals, "Avenue Q" and "Hairspray," were shuttered when they couldn't fill large theaters.
Talk of varying levels of artistic quality doesn't phase Horiuchi, who has pushed to build a big theater since 1978. Aside from the 2002 Olympics, the county commissioner characterizes the opening nights of the first tour of "The Phantom of the Opera" and "Les Miserables" as the biggest events ever to occur in Salt Lake County.
Horiuchi claims Live Nation shows are subsidizing other arts groups because the company pays market-rate rents for county facilities and a higher percentage to support the county's ArtTix operation.
"Here's the thing: The arts community doesn't agree with me, but a rising tide lifts all boats," the politician says. "I do not believe the same crowd goes to a Broadway-style production that goes to the opera. There's not going to be one human being who stops going to the symphony if they go to a Broadway show."
But working theater artists remain more cautious. "People who say we need a Broadway-style theater in Utah, I want to ask: 'Have you ever been to Broadway?' '' says John Caywood, a local director who works as operations director at Kingsbury Hall, where the auditorium has about 100 nights of sell-outs annually. "People who haven't been there think there is some theater mecca. Broadway theaters feel like the Capitol. If they want a 3,000-seat barn, that's something else."
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Contact Ellen Fagg at ellenf@sltrib.com or 801-257-8621.
Season ticket prices For Live Nation's Broadway Across America-Utah season, tickets
range from $99 to $395 for five shows, compared with a seven-play
package at Pioneer Memorial Theatre, which ranges from $70 balcony
seats to $244. Some Broadway Across America touring shows feature
members of the professional union, Actors' Equity Association, while
all shows at Pioneer employ union actors. That compares with Hale
Centre Theatre, a company noted for its technical effects and use of
avocational actors (rather than union), where prices range from $104
to $134 for six shows.
Ticket Trends Doom and gloom accompanied the notice last month of early closings of
two popular Tony Award-winning Broadway shows in Las Vegas, "Avenue
Q" and "Hairspray." With ticket sales taking a dive in such well- funded, for-profit venues, some theater artists point to an
oversaturated entertainment market as responsible for the drop in
selling seats at nonprofit companies as well.
According to the 2004 "Theatre Facts" report, the most recent
survey of nonprofit regional theaters compiled by the Theatre
Communications Group. According to the report, theater attendance
nationally was down for the second year in a row and lower than in
any of the past five years. Sixty percent of theaters saw reported an
increase in single-ticket income, but the number of season
subscribers dropped 3 percent over the past five years. "Think about
it more than a third of subscribers are now choosing not to renew
at the end of the season," the report's authors wrote.
Here's a quick glance at a handful of Salt Lake County nonprofit
theaters, which report a similar trend:
Grand Theatre Resident company at Salt Lake Community College's South City campus,
1575 S. State St., Salt Lake City
Capacity: 1,100
Annual subscribers for 2006 season: 2,500
Increase or decrease over the past year: Flat
Hale Centre Theatre Resident company at West Valley City-owned theater, built in 1998.
Capacity: 530
Annual subscribers for 2006 season: 18,975
Increase: 6 percent
Pioneer Theatre Company Resident company at University of Utah's Simmons Pioneer Memorial
Theatre, 300 S. 1400 East, Salt Lake City, rennovated in 2001
Capacity: 932
Subscribers for 2005-06 season: 5,600
Decrease: 17 percent drop from 6,800
Plan -B Theatre Company Resident at county-owned Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, 138 W.
300 South, Salt Lake City
Capacity: 60-525
Ticket sales for 2005-06*: 3,590
Increase: 49 percent
* Includes the completed shows of the company's season, which runs on
a calendar year; also includes attendance at a special event
production, the revivial of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"
Pygmalion Theatre Company Performs at Studio or Black Box theatres at the Rose Wagner
Capacity: 100 seats per show
Ticket sales for 2005-06: 2,421
Increase: 18 percent
* Moved from Ogden to SLC in 2002; changed from calendar year to
season scheduling this year
Salt Lake Acting Company Resident at Salt Lake City-owned former church at 168 West 500 North
Capacity: 160-206 per show
Annual subscribers for 2005-06 season: 2,185
Decrease: 6 percent
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