Some Good News for Great Lakes

Sunday, February 26, 2006
By Tony Brown, Plain Dealer Theater Critic

Great Lakes Theater Festival brought its attendance and ticket sales figures back up in 2005, the second year of producing four classic plays in two discrete summer and fall repertories. Both numbers had fallen in 2004.

But Great Lakes producing artistic director Charles Fee now has abandoned the summer-fall rep schedule in favor of a fall-spring rep schedule for 2006-07 as he seeks to formalize a producing partnership with Idaho Shakespeare Festival, where he holds a similar title.

The 2006-07 schedule will start Friday, Sept. 15, to Saturday, Oct. 21, with “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” a fatuous Broadway musical – and the first musical at Great Lakes since 2003’s “Anything Goes.” It will be performed in repertory (the same actors performing both shows at alternating performances) with Shakespeare’s comedy “Love’s Labour’s Lost.”

Great Lakes will present its annual holiday production of “A Christmas Carol” – Cleveland’s most popular yuletide entertainment tradition – from Friday, Nov. 24, until Saturday, Dec. 23.

The spring repertory will run March 16-April 21, 2007, and will feature Noel Coward’s comedy “Hay Fever” and “The Tempest,” a philosophical adventure tale that many believe to be Shakespeare’s finest and most original creation.

All performances will be in the Ohio Theatre in downtown Cleveland’s Playhouse Square.

As has become the norm under Fee, it’s a heavily comic season, though “Love’s Labour’s” is considered to be a challenging comedy for modern audiences, and “The Tempest” is classified in the Bard canon as a “romance,” a more sophisticated and involved form of comedy.

The switch in scheduling – the 2004 and ’05 repertory seasons ran roughly from July through October – will allow Great Lakes to share productions more efficiently with Idaho Shakespeare in Boise, an outdoor theater that operates in the summer and early fall.

Plans call for “Funny Thing” and “Love’s Labour’s” to open in Boise and travel to Cleveland. “Hay Fever” and “The Tempest” start in Cleveland and then head west for Idaho’s 2007 season.

The arrangement saves money, offers actors longer contracts and allows productions to reach a higher aesthetic level as they are rethought and remounted, Fee said.

“We’re creating one theater company with two venues,” Fee said. “They’re a few thousand miles apart. For the actors, that’s an eight-hour plane trip. For the sets, it’s three days by truck.”

The 2006-07 season announcement was accompanied by the release of box-office figures from the nonprofit theater that show 32 percent growth in subscriptions (and a 20 percent increase in season-ticket income) over 2004.

Overall attendance – excluding “A Christmas Carol” and not taking into account student matinees – rose 21 percent, overall ticket sales nearly 17 percent.

That was more than enough to erase dips in 2004, the first year Great Lakes went from a school-year production schedule to the summer-fall rep model.

“A Christmas Carol” attendance last year held steady at 15,000 for public performances and 10,000 for student matinees, about the same as 2004, and ticket revenues (not including student matinees) jumped nearly 4 percent to $376,117, largely because ticket prices went up slightly.

The “Christmas Carol” figures were especially welcome news for Great Lakes in the face of the Cleveland Play House’s spectacularly successful first production of “A Christmas Story.” The Play House will bring “Christmas Story” back again next season, artistic director Michael Bloom said, in hopes of building an annual holiday franchise of its own.

With last season’s growth and Fee’s trimming of the company’s budget (the staff is down to 13, and actors get paid less than they used to thanks to a break from the Actors’ Equity Association union), Great Lakes has paid off a budget deficit that ranged as high as $1.05 million in 2002.

In fact, executive director Bob Taylor said, once all revenues are counted and all bills paid for 2005, the company probably will end up with a $45,000 surplus for the year. On top of that, Great Lakes has raised a $400,000 reserve to ease cash-flow ebbs, which Taylor predicts will reach $500,000 by the end of this year.

Despite all the good news, Fee said he is far from satisfied with Great Lakes’ financial standing.

Subscriptions are up, but only to 2,500 – a paltry number for a company that performs in a 1,000-seat theater.

And overall attendance (again, excluding student matinees) for “Amadeus,” 2005’s most popular show after “A Christmas Carol,” was only slightly more than 6,000 when 12,000 seats were available over the run. Averaging 500 people a night is not bad for Great Lakes, but half-filled crowds don’t look so good in the Ohio.

Which is why Great Lakes is looking to move, in a couple of seasons, to Hanna Theatre. The company is now in planning and negotiation sessions with Playhouse Square Foundation, which owns the Hanna, and key funders to examine how the Hanna could be converted into a 500-seat (or slightly smaller) thrust stage better suited to Great Lakes’ mission and aesthetic.

Season-ticket prices for 2006-07 range from $460 (for 10 tickets good to any play) to $36 (for one ticket to each of three plays, for patrons 25 and younger). Individual tickets will range from $22 to $56, with student tickets going for $13. For details on subscriptions, call 216-664-6064. Single tickets will go on sale later.

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
tbrown@plaind.com, 216-999-4181
© 2006 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.