New Equity Exec Knows Both Sides

Five years ago, John Holly helped negotiate Actors’ Equity’s new Western Civic Light Opera contract as a representative of the producers. Earlier this year, he helped renegotiate it as a representative of the union.

His former producer colleagues “knew they couldn’t pull anything over on me,” Holly said.

Yes, the new Western Regional Director of the actors union did a sharp about-face when he took the job. He has been an Equity member since 1968, but he also worked as a producer for 22 years--at Ford’s Theater in Washington, Theatre Under the Stars in Houston and Music Theatre of Wichita. During all that time, he never gave up his Equity card. He said he occasionally even hired himself as an actor.

He believes he can use his producing experience on behalf of Equity. “It taught me a lot about how the other half thinks,” Holly said. “I can speak their language. I can suggest funding ideas that maybe they haven’t considered.”

It’s a time of major challenges and opportunities for Equity.

High up in the opportunity column is the new contract that the “Ragtime” company is using at the Shubert Theatre. It isn’t the normal Production Contract that most commercial theater companies have used for years. It’s a separate pact that was ironed out between Equity and “Ragtime” producer Livent Inc.

In its most important provision, it gives an extra 10% of minimum salary (amounting to $104 per week) to members of Livent choruses in “Ragtime” and elsewhere--if they agree to stay in their show for a year. They also get an additional 10% bonus at the end of the year.

The Production Contract offers no such incentive to stay. But that contract allows chorus members to leave with only two weeks’ notice if they get a better job elsewhere. With the new contract, actors can leave only after 22 weeks, if they give four weeks’ notice and sacrifice the 12-month premium.

Generally “Equity strives for longer terms of employment,” Holly said, “and we had never been presented with anything like this before.”

Livent Chairman and CEO Garth Drabinsky said that the new contract “buys stability and industrial calm.” In a company as large as his, “I just can’t have casting calls for replacements every week in every show. It’s enormously costly.” He also noted that while the new contract promotes constancy, it also makes it easier to replace extremely long-running actors who may begin to do the role by rote.

The same contract has been offered to other commercial producers, but so far none has agreed to it, Holly said.

One of the challenges facing Equity is the increasing number of non-Equity shows booked into series or venues that traditionally book Equity shows. Equity picketed a recent non-Equity “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” at Long Beach and was prepared to do the same at “Singin’ in the Rain” this week in Pasadena--until the booking was canceled. An upcoming tour of “State Fair” (its itinerary tentatively includes Palm Desert and Escondido next February) went non-Equity, though its star, John Davidson, recently headed an all-Equity version of the same show. Equity has announced plans to discipline Davidson, in conjunction with the other actor unions.

“There’s a place for non-Equity performances,” Holly said. “Actors have to start somewhere.” But he said such shows shouldn’t be presented in series like Long Beach’s “Broadway at the Beach” because it’s misleading to associate them with Broadway. “The public was getting ripped off.”

At the same time, he recognizes that presenters have suffered from “a dearth of musicals” in recent years. “If our picketing causes them to go out of business, that’s not doing us any good. So we’d love to be partners and come up with a contract that they can live with.”

Holly is big on toning down adversarial attitudes. “Partnerships are good,” he said. “Let’s eliminate the barrier between labor and management. We’re doing good-quality theater together. They need us, we need them.”

This applies also to L.A.’s contentious 99-seat theater scene, Holly said. With the producers’ organization Theatre L.A., Equity is working on a contract that would lower the risk for producers who want to move shows from sub-100-seat venues to mid-sized ones.

It’s “worth investigating” why some other entertainment unions allow members to work nonunion jobs--for less remuneration, of course--while Equity doesn’t, Holly said. Still, that principle isn’t likely to change any time soon, and Holly advocates better education of potential Equity members so they understand their commitment not to work in non-Equity shows.