A few years ago, someone introduced Canadian Stage executive director Marty Bragg to a potential new sponsor for the Toronto theatre company. A lunch was arranged and Bragg went off to meet Aubrey Dan, scion of the Novopharm generic-drug fortune.
Dan possessed the two most desirable characteristics you can find in a theatre patron: a passion for the art and deep pockets. Indeed, his enthusiasm was such that, at the end of the lunch, he offered to write a cheque on the spot.
Not so fast, said Bragg, careful to remind him that the fastest way to make a million dollars in the theatre is to start with a billion.
Dan, however, was not discouraged. Over the next few years, he capitalized three separate CanStage productions - Urinetown (he lost $1-million plus), Ain't Misbehavin' (on which he made a small profit), and Hair (another half-million down the drain).
Since then, he's been stung by substantial losses on Broadway musicals ( The Pirate Queen, The Wedding Singer) and some off-Broadway productions as well.
But Aubrey Dan is the son of a Holocaust survivor, and he clearly has inherited something of his father's determination and tenacity. He has also learned a few things from his mistakes.
So instead of folding his hand, he's raising the stakes.
In a few weeks, beginning with the smash Broadway hit The Drowsy Chaperone (it opens next Wednesday at Toronto's Elgin Theatre), the 43-year-old impresario is launching his first full subscription season, a series of six shows that also includes The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, My Fair Lady, Avenue Q, Marion J. Caffey's 3 Mo' Divas and the Tony Award-winning Jersey Boys.
In so doing, Dan is betting on more than the commercial drawing power of these six shows. He's betting that the Toronto theatre market is ready to rebound and that he can sustain head-to-head competition with the long-established Mirvish organization.
During a recent catered lunch in his sprawling North York offices, Dan maintained that the market - stung by the demise of Garth Drabinksy's once-thriving Livent empire, the aftershocks of 9/11, the 2003 SARS outbreak, the rise of the Canadian dollar and a sharp decline in American tourists - is ripe for redevelopment.
"I see the landscape as opportunistic," Dan said, enjoying the same meal (today a grilled breast of chicken, salad, vegetables) that he daily serves freely to his 40 employees. "It's slightly distressed. The infrastructure is there - the theatres - but management and systems are either neglected or not fully utilized. So the Toronto Arts Centre is 90-per-cent dark. The Elgin Theatre is 75-per-cent dark. And it's costing taxpayers money. So first you have to find competent managers and then you have to invest, build the foundation, expecting no ROI [return on investment]for two to three years. You have to think long term. And because I'm coming in with things at distress levels, expectations are minimal."
Dan sees his theatrical arm, Dancap Productions, as the venture-capital division of his highly profitable investment business, Dancap Equities, which owns stakes in dozens of companies. His proven expertise here, he believes, can boost his theatrical ambitions.
As things now stand, a Broadway or West End hit that moves to a new territory typically raises new money for each new production. "But is that the most efficient method?" he asks. "Why not monetize or securitize the asset? Why not arrange third-party financing? This can be more effective."
Before he set up Dancap five years ago, Dan had been president of Wampole Canada Inc., a 105-year-old pharmaceutical company; president of Strikepoint Laboratories, a high-tech R&D firm; and, before he was 30, director of sales at Novopharm, the firm his billionaire father - who landed in Canada in 1947 with $10 - founded in 1965.
In the pharmaceutical business, he notes, "it's all about the pipeline -- what products are in development." The same, he maintains, holds for theatre.
To that end, Dan has been busy forging alliances with producers in the United States. Last month, for example, he chipped in $800,000 to take an equity stake in Elephant Eye Theatrical, an alliance of private and not-for-profit producers that plans to develop a series of new musicals, including The Addams Family, based on characters, cartoons and sketches by legendary cartoonist Charles Addams, and Bruce Lee: Journey to the West. Dan would have first dibs on Canadian productions of these shows.
He owns a stake of the touring production of Jersey Boys, which will open at the Toronto Arts Centre in August, 2008. And he, along with Steven Spielberg, owns a stake in Aaron Sorkin's new play, The Farnsworth Invention, about the inventor of television, starring Hank Azaria and directed by Toronto's Des McAnuff. It opens Nov. 14 at New York's Music Box Theatre.
Dan's downtown rival, David Mirvish, takes a diplomatic approach to the new kid on the block - despite having lost a few in-house staffers to Dancap raids. "Theatre is a fickle god," Mirvish says, "and none of us is smart enough to know what will or won't succeed. On that level, I welcome anyone willing to risk their money on live theatre. It's a big city and I want it to be a bigger city. If you want to see the city grow, you're never going to be alone."
His former partner at CanStage, Marty Bragg, thinks Dan can succeed. "I'm always the eternal optimist. I remember the mid-nineties, when Garth and David were both active, as a golden time. More begets more. I hope Aubrey does well."
That said, there is some fear that the net effect of any bidding war between Mirvish and Dan for hit shows will be higher ticket prices. Dan thinks such concerns are overblown.
"There is a lot of product out there." Moreover, he says, there's no need to draw 40 to 50 per cent of your audience from the U.S. "That's dreaming in Technicolor. The Ontario/Quebec market is large enough - if you make theatre compelling. You have to do more than meet their expectations - you have to exceed them."
Dan says he also sees opportunity in other Canadian cities, where many large theatres are also dark much of the time. "Once you have the product, you roll it out. It increases my purchasing power. I call it low-hanging fruit. But you have to build the organization and build the reputation one step at a time."