Tag Archives: playhouse

Business, News

Theatre Puget Sound and Cornish Vie for Seattle Center Playhouse Lease

(Photo: MvB)

On August 21, Theatre Puget Sound, the trade and service organization that counts as members more than 140 area arts organizations, makes its final presentation to a Seattle Center Advisory Commission regarding their proposal to run the Center’s Playhouse (formerly leased by Intiman Theatre) as an arts incubator.

They’ve written up a 16-page proposal, bolstered by pages and pages of letters of support from arts groups. As the current lessees of the Center’s Center House  and Black Box theaters and Studio4 (on the fourth floor of the Center House), TPS would look to be a shoo-in. Except.

Cornish College of the Arts would also like in. Cornish, mentioning as an aside its $3 million in reserves, makes this a competition between two 400-pound gorillas. But their aims are quite different.

Cornish wants to take over management of the Playhouse primarily for its own student productions–the college produces more than 150 performances and exhibitions each year, and they would like to bring music and drama performances, especially, to a higher-visibility location. Cornish’s proposal emphasizes its compatibility with the reduced-in-size Intiman; besides complementary schedules (Cornish is happy to hand off the Playhouse to Intiman for summer festivals), Cornish is inarguably, inextricably part of the arts ecosystem in Seattle, as their proposal notes:

  • Cornish Theater Chair Richard E.T. White is a member of Intiman Theatre’s Artistic Collective, as are faculty members Marya Sea Kaminski and Sheila Daniels.
  • Artists involved in the 2012 Intiman Summer Season include Cornish faculty members Timothy McCuen Piggee, Marya Sea Kaminski, Carol Roscoe, Wade Madsen and Geof Alm, alumni Quinn Armstrong, Jerick Hoffer, Fawn Ledesma, Sara Peterson and Kayla Walker, as well as current student interns Jonathan Crimeni, Andrew Highlands, Holly McNeill, Jonathon Pyburn, Angela Rose Sink and Megan Tuschhoff.
  • Artistic Director Andrew Russell directed last fall’s Cornish Theater/Performance Production presentation of Oo-Bla-Dee by Regina Taylor.

Cornish is offering $3,000 per month rent for 2013, increasing to $5,000 per month for succeeding years. On a square-footage basis, this would rank as one of the sweetest commercial real estate deals in Seattle–but Cornish also suggests that included as rent would be in-kind services (tickets given away for events) and sub-market-rate rentals to other arts organizations. Furnishing a detailed schedule, Cornish proposes operating the Playhouse “from 9 a.m. to midnight most days from early September to early December and mid-January to early May.”

The Theatre Puget Sound “arts incubator” proposal represents, perhaps, a bigger break with Playhouse management past–Cornish replacing Intiman as the singular primary tenant isn’t structurally that different, except for being a college, instead of a theatre)–but it may be a good break. As TPS makes clear, they are not a producing organization, so their management of the Playhouse can be devoted to its maximal usage.

Their proposal envisions a “24/7” operation, with events open to the general public “generally be restricted to between 10:00 a.m. and 1:00 a.m.” Their rent payment to the Seattle Center would not be a flat-fee, but based upon a split in gross revenue, as is currently the case with their other Seattle Center venues. They argue that they have substantially outperformed the flat-fee rate suggested for those venues, and if that’s true, the Center would of course certainly be the people who would know.

What is most interesting about the TPS proposal is that it addresses a structural issue in the Seattle arts community, which is that there has been nowhere for a successful small or mid-sized theatre to “go” but into debt on venue acquisition–hoping that the location is amenable to their audience, will allow for growth, and won’t become a mortgaged millstone. (Over on Capitol Hill, Capitol Hill Housing is developing an arts center that will be the home of three resident companies: Washington Ensemble Theatre, New Century Theatre, and Strawberry Theatre Workshop.)

A further detail is the prospective stances with regard to the IATSE local that currently provides union labor for the Playhouse’s operations. In either case, an accord would need to be reached concerning non-union labor in the Playhouse, as smaller arts groups would be unable to shoulder that financial burden, and Cornish hopes to use interns extensively as part of work training for its students.

Here is the TPS proposal (pdf); here is the Cornish proposal (pdf).

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Andrew Russell and the Intiman in October

A message from the Intiman (Photo: MvB)

“I’m a little dumbfounded,” I wrote Bruce Bradburn, Intiman’s board chair, “that there’s not been a full public accounting prior to what sounds like a praiseworthy attempt to reinvent the theatre artistically.”

I’d just read Misha Berson’s story in the Seattle Times, on Intiman’s plans to reopen with Andrew Russell at the helm (while wishing Berson had asked a business reporter to collaborate):

Russell’s goal for 2012 is to establish a loose collective of playwrights, directors, actors, designers and others to devise projects for Intiman to produce, in a short “micro-season” mounted next summer.

Russell came to Intiman in 2009, from New York, to take the position of Associate Producer; he also conceived and directed The Thin Place, a show that was more interesting, I think, to talk about later than to sit through. More recently he staged the Seattle Men’s Chorus production of Jake Heggie‘s For a Look or a Touch, a work originally commissioned by Seattle’s Music of Remembrance.

Still, nothing in the announcement of Russell as consulting artistic director cast new light on how Intiman planned to reinvent itself as a company that wouldn’t financially crash and burn in spectacularly public fashion. Last fall, Intiman’s managing director left abruptly, a substantial amount of debt was “discovered,” and a desperate fundraising drive’s “success” was followed by the news that Intiman would close its doors.

While initially the Board claimed that it was “Shocked! Shocked!” at this evident gambling with Intiman’s financial future, it also developed that at least part of the Board had approved spending down millions of dollars from Intiman’s endowment over the past few years (it’s now been entirely spent on retiring debt).

The decision to hire Russell as consulting artistic director is a very preliminary step, Bradburn told me. In October, the full plan for the theatre will be revealed. That’s when Russell and the Board will present their artistic and business strategy to arts funders and to the Seattle Center, which remains on the hook for rent for the Intiman Playhouse. (Bradburn also disputed the accuracy of some of the points I raised in my email–though of course the Board has yet to release an official audit of the crisis, which would make accuracy a little easier to come by.)

With these early details, you get the impression that Intiman plans to follow in ACT Theatre’s footsteps, which is not surprising since they’re being advised by consultant Susan Trapnell, author of ACT’s near-death turnaround. In particular, Intiman may become as much a hosting venue as a self-producing one, though (since Intiman doesn’t own the Playhouse) it remains to be seen if that’s as financially helpful as it is for ACT Theatre.

Another thing that may strike loyal Intiman-goers as strange (besides the members of the original “hold-up gang” appearing to circle around for another run at them) is the emphasis on how this reinvention is a return to Intiman’s core identity and roots.

The announcement makes reference to Intiman’s history of “staging innovative work and attracting a loyal following of patrons committed to exploring contemporary topics through the lens of epic stories”–“contemporary” and “epic” have to be precisely the wrong words. Simply put, Intiman was Seattle’s home for classic plays, with the space’s intimacy trumpeted in the very name.

That’s troubling because if there’s a tendency I’ve seen in this Board, it’s a willingness to believe their own spin even as it divorces itself from a reality apparent to everyone else. Break from a classics tradition if you’d like, just don’t claim that it’s not a break.

Russell told Berson that “one of the main things the board learned” from the crisis was the need to be “financially viable and artistically robust. We’d become a leaner and more nimble organization, more pay-as-you-go.”

That sounds good, but it is boilerplate that anyone on the Board could have produced for you before that last crisis–no one sets out to be artistically non-viable and artistically frail. What matters is actual practice. The group of people in charge of Intiman’s “financial viability” is the same group that oversaw the Intiman that spent itself out of existence. How they have developed a new concept of viability while being unable to divulge how Intiman reached outright closure is a mystery fit for the stage.