Jackie Maxwell's penultimate season as artistic director of the Shaw Festival saw the lowest attendance of her tenure – and ended in a deficit of $1.75-million.
The Niagara-on-the-Lake repertory company revealed the disappointing financial results of the 2015 season at an annual general meeting on Friday afternoon.
While the Shaw Festival had hoped and planned for ticket sales to go up this past season, instead they slipped by 16,388 from the year before – resulting in overall attendance of 232,671.
Tim Jennings, who took over as executive director at the $27-million theatre company from Elaine Calder only this fall, suggests that a "summer congested with other activities" such as the Pan Am Games may have distracted some potential audience members from Toronto – and related traffic issues along the QEW corridor may have deterred others.
"They tried very hard to do good things and grow audience … but it was very hard with all of the things that were competing," explains Jennings. "It was an aspirational budget that combined with difficult sales."
The good news was that attendance at each of the festival's three smaller theatres was up year over year – with critical hits such as Michel Marc Bouchard's The Divine, Tony Kushner's The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide and Peter and the Starcatcher also playing to strong houses.
But the major problem was that not one of the three productions in the main 856-seat Festival theatre – the 1960s musical Sweet Charity, Moss Hart's 1948 comedy Light Up the Sky, or Peter Hinton's update of Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion – attracted enough audience to hit its sales targets.
Indications that sales were soft for these titles came well before the season began. Then, theatre critics (not just The Globe and Mail's) were not kind to Light Up The Sky, and complained that Sweet Charity was miscast. The latter landed the furthest from its internal sales goal.
While a return to a deficit position is less than ideal, the Shaw Festival has clawed back from bigger financial challenges during Maxwell's tenure – notably, a $3-million hole after her first season in 2003 and back-to-back million-plus-dollar deficits in 2010 and 2011.
A larger decade-plus trend of declining attendance – not dissimilar to that observed at the Stratford Festival, Ontario's other destination repertory theatre – is the bigger challenge. Jennings notes that, even as overall sales have gone down, the number of households buying tickets has increased by 30 per cent in the past 15 years. The immediate plan to get attendance back up to a healthy 250,000 and beyond is to convince spectators to stay longer in Niagara-on-the-Lake and see more shows.
Early indicators are looking up for 2016, according to Jennings. Following last year's extended run of Peter and the Starcatcher, the Shaw hopes to lure back family vacationers with Hinton's new adaptation of Alice in Wonderland – and convince them to sample other family-friendly shows such as Athol Fugard's "Master Harold"… and the Boys and Thornton Wilder's Our Town.
And while the falling loonie did not result in more visitors from the United States in 2015, Jennings says it seems to be starting to have an effect. "We're about 1,500 U.S. buyers over last year to date," he says.
The Shaw Festival is in transition at the moment – with new artistic director Tim Carroll on-site since December shadowing Maxwell and planning his first season for 2017. Plans to launch a capital campaign to replace aging theatres are on hold until Carroll settles in. "Tim's going to need a year or two just to decide what he doesn't have," says Jennings.
As for the challenge of having two men named Tim in the top positions, Jennings says the confusion is being kept to a minimum: "He's called TC, I'm Tim. He's been TC all his life."
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J. Kelly Nestruck