“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” has turned out to be the perfect script for Hartford Stage, not just for the residual revenues from its Broadway run but also its recent Tony nomination for best musical.
In Connecticut and nationally, regional theaters continue to produce hits destined for Broadway and Tony acclaim — but the days of business being on easy street are long gone, experts say.
Budgets are tightening amid a precipitous decline in season-ticket holders, sending theaters scrambling to replace those revenues with decidedly less stable funding from single-ticket sales, grants and individual contributions.
In fiscal 2012, Hartford Stage earned $8.1 million in revenue, up 11 percent from a year earlier, but still more than $500,000 short of expenses.
Hartford Stage’s executive director Michael Stotts said the loss amounts to a structural funding gap that the nonprofit must find ways to plug — whether through ticket sales, contributions or other means.
There is only so much a theater can do to trim expenses, he said, without impacting stagecraft. After eliminating positions, sharing production costs with other venues and renegotiating compensation, benefits and leases — all of which Hartford Stage has done in recent years — the best path to financial stability remains revenue growth.
Until a rising tide of season subscribers materializes, however, the theater must boost single-ticket sales, putting more pressure than ever on Hartford Stage’s creative staff led by artistic director Darko Tresnjak. The past three years, Hartford Stage has retained Target Resource Group, a consultancy that works with theaters on pricing strategies, marketing campaigns, and developing one-on-one interactions with patrons.
“That is the most unnerving and unsettling thing that we have to deal with right now, because there’s no predicting what a show is going to do in sales and how audiences are going to respond to it,” Stotts said.
As such, Hartford Stage will take hits where it can find them — and it definitely found one in “A Gentleman’s Guide,” which Tresnjak directed on Broadway. Among its 10 Tony award nominations, the play is vying for best musical alongside “After Midnight,” chronicling Harlem’s golden days of jazz; Disney’s stage adaptation of “Aladdin”; and “Beautiful — The Carole King Musical.” The Tony awards are scheduled for June 8.
During “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder’s” run at Hartford Stage in 2012 and San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre last year, it caught the eye of a producer who agreed to underwrite the show on Broadway.
Hartford Stage has since received average weekly royalties of about $1,000, said Stotts — a take that could increase if the show wins best musical and draws bigger audiences.
“There is a lot of attention being paid to the show, and the producers are in the process of figuring out next steps for it, whether it’s a national tour … [or] a production in London,” Stotts said. “A lot will depend on the outcome of this awards season.”
Although Broadway attendance dropped in the last two years, Stotts said Hartford Stage is seeing an audience rebound, projecting as many as 82,900 visitors this year compared to 71,700 in the 2012-2013 season, and about 79,700 the season before. That is still well off the 100,000-attendee mark Hartford Stage hit in 2008 and 2009 (a figure boosted by two big hits), before the recession squeezed entertainment spending.
Any attendance boost has implications for downtown Hartford, whose hospitality sector counts on draws like Hartford Stage to generate foot traffic in the evenings, said Mike Zaleski, executive director of the Hartford Business Improvement District.
“When Hartford Stage has a show, the restaurants and bars in the general area of the theater are very busy,” Zaleski said. “There are weekends where we have shows going on at the Hartford Stage, TheaterWorks, The Bushnell and the XL Center. Those are very busy weekends for downtown Hartford restaurants.”
The decline in season-ticket holders is a problem shared by theaters nationally, said Tim Shields, president of the League of Resident Theatres and managing director of the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J.
In 2012, McCarter debuted the comedy “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” which went on to win a 2013 Tony for best play. The comedy will start a month-long run at Hartford Stage later this month.
“Many theaters find themselves more stable than they were three or…five years ago, but still at a reduced level of expense and income from what we may have enjoyed prior to the recession,” Shields said. “For all of us, we’ve done all the things in the back office that any industry or organization under economic distress would do. We’ve gotten leaner and tried to reassign jobs and tried to be better and more efficient and effective at developing projects … and going out and fundraising.”
Hartford Stage offers educational workshops for area students, which has become a big part of the theater’s mission and a significant revenue stream as well. It helps generate about $800,000 annually, and amounts to 10 percent of Hartford Stage’s overall budget, Stotts said.
But the most significant revenue still comes from ticket sales, particularly to season subscribers.
Shields said the Tony success of “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” galvanized the McCarter Theatre’s season-ticket holders, leaving open the possibility Hartford Stage could see a similar halo effect.
“The effect that we saw was … sort of the glow of the award,” Shields said. “More subscribers seemed to want to stay with us because we’d done this play … It builds that morale and goodwill and institutional momentum.”
