A Strong Show of Support for the Arts in ’98

Gil Cates, producing director of Westwood’s Geffen Playhouse, joked in a recent conversation that when theater managers see good ticket sales, they attribute it to good shows--and when ticket sales are bad, they attribute it to the weather. “Typical Broadway analysis,” Cates said.

But even though they tend to read the data in their own favor, an unscientific poll of managing directors of Los Angeles area performing arts venues shows that many can boast a good-to-excellent year for 1998 when it comes to ticket sales.

While almost every theater can point to at least one unexpected failure in the past year, the bulk of those interviewed reported strong ticket sales for individual events, plus better-than-usual subscription sales and private donations.

And they are citing everything from shrewd, innovative programming to the strong Southern California economy to explain their good fortune.

“It’s been great--and the economy is definitely part of that,” said Tom Mitze, executive director of Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza. “I remember tracking subscription sales over a 20-year period a couple of years ago, and [comparing it] with a graph of the ups and downs of the economy in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and they almost paralleled each other.”

Though Canon Theatre’s co-executive director Joan Stein would go no further than to call 1998 ticket sales “OK, but not stunning,” she added that Alfred Uhry’s comedy “Last Night of Ballyhoo,” which opened in October, had the largest advance sales of any show ever presented at the Beverly Hills theater, even though in general musicals have sold better there than plays.

Martin Wiviott, general manager of Hollywood’s Pantages, believes that a booming economy does not have much positive effect on individual ticket sales. “In fact, when things are a little more difficult, you find people saying, ‘We need to take a break, and just do something enjoyable,’ ” he noted. Still, ticket sales were good this year for “Peter Pan,” the always-popular “Phantom of the Opera” with Davis Gaines--and tickets to “Annie,” coming in January, are selling briskly as holiday gifts.

The Pantages’ big disappointment this year was “The Gin Game,” with Charles Durning and Julie Harris, which played in early December; Wiviott blames the holiday season. “It was absolutely wonderful, but it just didn’t catch on,” Wiviott said. “It’s the kind of show that just doesn’t have any relationship to the holiday.”

Cates said subscriptions for the Geffen increased from 7,000 to 8,200 from last season. “Subscription is really the essential part of our enterprise, because we are committed to doing a season of plays, five or six plays a year, and there is no upside to that without a subscription base,” he said. “It’s not like you do a play and you run it until it has no legs. . . . If it’s a hit, you still have to close it, and if it doesn’t do as well as you’d hoped it would, you still have to run it.”

Cates said a surprise hit in 1998 was February’s “Harriet’s Return,” starring Debbie Allen as Harriet Tubman. And on the downside was Martin McDonagh’s “Cripple of Inishmaan”; Cates believes a bad review crippled ticket sales.

At the nearby UCLA Center for the Performing Arts, programming coordinator and marketing director Celesta Billeci said that the season-opener, the North American debut of France’s Ballet Preljocaj doing “Romeo and Juliet,” was this year’s surprise sellout. “It was a major risk,” she said. “Tickets weren’t selling up until the end, but it turned out to be one of the best things we ever presented.”

Also strong, she added, was the center’s “Word of Mouth” series, which included Spalding Gray and National Public Radio commentator David Sedaris. And cheap to produce. “All you need is a microphone, a podium and a glass of water,” Billeci said.

At UCLA and elsewhere, there was a mini-trend in the unexpected success of exotic, esoteric offerings. The Whirling Dervishes remained hot at UCLA for a sixth year; in Thousand Oaks, Tibetan monks and the Matsuri-Shu Japanese Drummers sold as well as the Broadway musicals. And, at the Shubert Theatre, “The Last Empress,” in Korean with subtitles, sold out for 2 1/2 weeks.

The Shubert can also boast the summer success of “Chicago,” which sold to over 80% capacity after moving across town from the Music Center’s Ahmanson Theatre, where it was also a hit. Across the plaza, at the Music Center’s Mark Taper Forum, managing director of Center Theater Group Charles Dillingham reports that October’s Sondheim revue, “Putting It Together,” was a season hit.

Wayne Shilkret, executive director of the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, said: “The only challenge we’ve had is selling classical music; everything else is really up for us.”

Willem Wijnbergen, managing director of the region’s biggest presenter of classical music, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was traveling and could not be reached for comment on ticket sales. And due to the Philharmonic’s vacation schedule, no one else authorized to comment was available. But Wijnbergen’s counterpart at L.A. Opera, Peter Hemmings, said things couldn’t be better than they were in 1998.

“We’ve increased our subscription by more than 2,000. We now have 16,500 subscribers,” Hemmings said. “I think that is attributable to several things; we have five very popular operas this year, and also the economy looks much more encouraging.”

Hemmings is pleased by the popularity of December’s family-appeal opera, “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” the first world premiere of an American opera that L.A. Opera has ever done. But the biggest hit--no surprise--was the September season-opener, “Carmen,” with Jennifer Larmore and Placido Domingo.

Apparently, however, matinee power won out over star power: The most successful single performance of 1998 was a Saturday matinee of “Carmen” without Domingo, which netted more than $250,000, the biggest sum the opera has ever taken in for any performance. “Saturday and Sunday matinees are always our best dates,” Hemmings said.