Let’s get Fiscal: GLTF is out of the red and back in the pink
*Excerpted from original article

Tuesday, February 28, 2006
By James Damico, Cleveland Free Times writer

The newsy aspect of Great Lakes Theater Festival’s announcement of its upcoming 45th season is that, following a two-year experiment with an August-to-January performance calendar, it’s returning in 2006-07 to a traditional fall-through-spring schedule. Integral as the change may be to GLTF’s future health, more salutary tidings lay in the accompanying projection that by close of fiscal 2005-06, and in the short space of four years, the classical repertory company expects to have miraculously turned a $1,059,000 accumulated deficit into a $44,000 surplus. “It’s definitely no miracle,” corrects Charles Fee, GLTF’s producing artistic director. “It’s the result of a lot of careful planning, hard work and the essential collaboration of a host of dedicated folks.”

Though he doesn’t characterize it as such, Fee inherited a financial and artistic mess at his 2002 hiring. (...)

(...) Besides facing that million-smackeroo debt, the new chief also had first to survive negotiations proposing a potentially disastrous merger with the Cleveland Play House. The latter had been bumbled to the brink of extinction by its abysmally inept, now ex-head Peter Hackett, and was looking to gobble up GLTF’s dwindling but still tangible resources.

Ultimately and wisely, the GLTF board nixed the deal, leaving Fee with merely the six-figure IOU to surmount. The comeback process began, admits executive director Bob Taylor, with some draconian measures. “We sold underutilized assets – such as the costume shop in Lakewood – and the gains on these asset sales went directly to deficit reduction.” There were also significant cuts in staff to what Taylor terms as “the right size. The team in place is skilled, motivated and extremely collaborative.” Concurrently, GLTF slashed its annual operating budget from $4.2 million in 2001-02 to “a level approximate to our income capacity,” which Taylor says has been “maintained ever since at just over $3 million.”

A setback came in 2004 with the reasonable bid for new audiences by switching to a summer-fall schedule. Instead, subscription sales slumped, and while they recovered somewhat in 2005 – along with a jump in single ticket purchases – the loss of spring student matinees and attendant education revenues was a prime impetus for a return to a performance calendar paralleling the school year. Taylor indicates that education income for the past season amounted to $307,000, 10 percent of GLTF’s total revenue – a figure expected to substantially increase with the restoration of spring student-matinee programming.

Conceivably, however, the central ingredient in GLTF’s fiscal elixir is its fraternal collaboration with the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, a summer company headquartered in Boise and also led by Fee. This season will see the two organizations stabilizing their pattern of sharing productions, with a pair of shows (the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost) originating in Boise this summer and then transferring to run in fall repertory at GLTF. After its annual Christmas Carol bash, the latter will create a springtime second pair of mountings (Noel Coward’s Hay Fever and the Bard’s swan song, The Tempest) that will complete the cycle by journeying west for summer ’07 outings in Boise.

Quite rightly, Fee enthuses over the artistic advantages of such a setup: “This season we’ll be offering 13 company members not only a variety of acting opportunities, but guaranteed employment for approximately 40 weeks, which is practically unheard of among the country’s resident theaters.” Taylor, however, points out some additional practical benefits. “Besides the creative and artistic merits,” he notes, “each company is realizing approximately $200,000 annually in expense savings due to this partnership.”

Both men are fulsome in their praise of the GLTF board of trustees in the recovery process, in particular for what Taylor terms its “outstanding financial commitment.” This included the completion of a working capital campaign to which board members contributed $200,000 in personal funding that was matched dollar-and-a-half for dollar by the Arts Advancement program of the Cleveland Foundation. This new half-million cash resource means, says Taylor, that “GLTF can operate from an asset position rather than a bank line of credit, and gain interest income rather than making interest payments. We’re actually in a pay-as-you-go situation.”

Not a statement you’ll hear issuing from the mouths of many arts administrators. But then this entire, thoroughly improbable financial turnaround – performed, let us not forget, in the penny-pinching post-9/11 economy – is hardly a common occurrence among arts or any other type of organization. A tribute to the GLTF personnel involved and a proof that sensible management and artistic temperament are not necessarily incompatible.

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