A Kim's Convenience truth: The St. Lawrence Centre is a worthy civic investment

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Ins Choi has been at more than a dozen opening nights of Kim's Convenience at this point, so you'd think he'd be a bit blasé by now.

Before this week, the playwright's hit comedy about a Korean-Canadian family running a Toronto convenience store had had five other runs in the city where it is set – and another eight runs across the country on a tour orchestrated by Soulpepper.

But the latest remount of Kim's Convenience – which kicked off Soulpepper's expanded Family Festival last week and has been extended by two performances to Jan. 3 – is different.

This is the first time that Mr. Kim's convenience store – its racks of chips, shelves of toilet paper and boxes of energy drinks – has been set up on stage at the Bluma Appel, the large 868-seat theatre in the city-owned St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts.

The opening was notable for Choi – who remembers going to see a Canadian Stage production in the Bluma while a theatre student at York University and thinking, "Wow!"

"It was the biggest theatre I'd been in at that point," he said in the lobby after last week's opening. "I thought it was like Broadway."

As momentous as Kim's victory lap at the Bluma is for the actors and creatives involved, it actually might be more significant for the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts.

Indeed, it is one of the most compelling justifications for the theatre's existence and city ownership in a long while.

Just four years ago, the St. Lawrence Centre – home to the Bluma, as well as a 497-seat theatre called the Jane Mallett – was in peril.

On his mission of "respect for taxpayers," then-mayor Rob Ford appointed a task force to examine the role and purpose of the centre and Toronto's two other civic theatres, the Sony Centre and the Toronto Centre for the Arts. The recommendations it returned included exploring the potential sale of all three.

That didn't happen. Instead, this past July, city council adopted a motion to "consolidate the operation of the city's three current civic theatres into a single organization." As of last month, the buildings now are one entity under a single board of directors comprising the mayor, four city councillors and eight appointed citizen members.

This should lead to more intelligent management of the theatres in question, but it likely won't save the city much money. The St. Lawrence Centre and its sisters cost about $4.7-million a year in total to operate.

In the language of the Ford era, that means they are still money-losing white elephants. But Kim's Convenience shows why some subsidized city-owned spaces – well, the Bluma Appel, at least – are still necessary in our era of fragmented audiences.

From the moment it was proposed as Toronto's centennial project, the St. Lawrence Centre was attacked from some corners as a waste of money.

"If our nay-saying, doom-crying, short-sighted, penny-pinching culture baiters want a fight – well, they've got it!" Mavor Moore, the Canadian nation builder who would become the first general manager of the centre, wrote in a 1966 Maclean's column defending the yet-unbuilt centre.

Moore won the fight – and the centre opened in 1970 and had a busy first decade. But frankly, his opponents weren't just penny-pinchers – and had a point.

The basic problem with the centre has always been this: The Bluma wasn't designed to house a theatre company that could fill 868 seats a night. Instead, the Bluma was built – and then a theatre company had to be created to fill it with plays, since the city's other not-for-profit companies weren't attracting, and never would attract, an audience that large.

That company was first called Toronto Arts Productions, then CentreStage, then – after 1987 – the Canadian Stage Company. Eddie Gilbert, who ran it in the early 1980s, put it this way: "Toronto has enormously successful alternative theatre companies. My company is the one to which they are alternatives."

Canadian Stage used to essentially produce in the Bluma from Labour Day to the end of May, but a not-for-profit company created to fill seats – rather than fulfill a clear artistic mission – was always going to run into trouble.

When it mounted shows that could fill the Bluma's seats with bums, Canadian Stage was criticized for being a commercial theatre company in not-for-profit clothes. But when it put on shows that didn't find that mass audience, it fell into deficit – such as the large one it has been clawing its way out of for the past four years.

Since being taken over by artistic director Matthew Jocelyn and "right-sized" by managing director Su Hutchinson, however, the company has liberated itself from the need to fill the Bluma – and found new artistic purpose.

Now, though the company's name is still on the side of the building, Canadian Stage only performs in the Bluma when a large stage is needed. That has led to fewer shows and shorter runs – a philosophy that means the company is occupying the Bluma for only 51 performances this season.

While that number is projected to triple in the 2016-17 season, according to Hutchinson, is it enough activity to really justify the centre's existence?

Enter Soulpepper.

While established companies are shrinking and new ones are perfectly content to play in tiny theatres, artistic director Albert Schultz's company – recently rebranded as a "civic theatre" – continues to grow its audience and is now bursting at the seams of the Young Centre for the Performing Arts in the Distillery District.

In 2014, running Kim's Convenience and A Christmas Carol over the holidays, Soulpepper did 22 per cent of its annual business over five weeks – and still saw room for growth.

And so this year, Soulpepper's Family Festival comprises four shows at the Young Centre – plus another two running in repertory at the Bluma. Schultz envisages making the festival even bigger in the future – partnering with other companies to make Toronto a holiday tourist destination. "The hope is that next year in this same time slot, we'll have a big new family show that would premiere at the Bluma – or a place like the Bluma," he says.

It's great to see Soulpepper grow into a bigger theatre and yet not have to worry about programming work there all year long, or being burdened by a capital campaign.

Down the line, there may be a conflict with Canadian Stage – Jocelyn's company is also developing a holiday family show for a future season, meaning that the newly appointed board of directors for Civic Theatres Toronto will have to decide who to rent the Bluma to. ("I would hope that with the 35 years of contracts I have in my filing cabinet with St. Lawrence Centre, that we have first right of refusal on the dates," Hutchinson says.)

But that's a better problem to face than the one the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts had just a few years ago.

Maybe the citizens who opposed it 50 years ago weren't so much short-sighted as the culture builders such as Mavor Moore who supported its construction were exceptionally far-sighted.