Theatre Tourism

Esther Hannaford stars in Melbourne’s KING KONG

A study done by the City of Toronto in 2008 revealed that the top reason  tourists visit our city was theatre.

Yes, theatre.

Not baseball or hockey or our museums or our shopping or even the CN Tower.

Theatre.

The study also identified that the lack of original productions unique to Toronto was an issue and partly the cause of the city’s tourism decline (Can I say “I told ya so” yet?).

Still, little is being done to correct the problem. Mirvish continues to present mostly touring productions with the exception of this year’s sit-down of a new staging of Les Miserables which already is drawing ticket sales from people outside of the Greater Toronto Area, including the important U.S. market, because of its stars Ramin Karimloo and Earl Carpenter. The pre-Broadway try-out of Aladdin should also see a spike in tourist visits, although with it heading to Broadway, most American audiences will wait to see it there.

But then there’s the tale of Evangeline, the new Canadian musical about the Acadian Expulsion by Ted Dykstra now having its world-premiere run at the Charlottetown Festival. In an interview with the Globe and Mail, Dykstra reveals that the original musical almost never made it to the stage at all after first approaching Mirvish Productions who initially loved the script and invested $500 000 for development, bringing in a Broadway writer to ‘fix it’. Instead, Dykstra says, the Mirvish team wanted to inject more “sex, violence and ‘kitchen sink’ realism” into the project to make it edgier. The collaboration fell apart and Mirvish was unwilling to invest any more money so the musical was set aside, all but forgotten until Dykstra was convinced to dust it off and bring it to the Charlottetown Festival where it has  earned good (but not great) reviews and strong ticket sales consisting largely of tourists. The festival had been suffering from steeply declining audiences until 2011, when the decision was made to revamp their production of Anne of Green Gables – a show that had been re-staged annually at the festival since 1965 – to experience an 85% rise in ticket sales. Evangeline is seeing audiences travel from across the country and beyond to see it and, along with Anne’s updating, has been revitalizing the once-floundering festival. Evangeline marks the first time a large-scale, original musical has been produced in Canada since Mirvish’s The Lord of the Rings in 2006

Meanwhile, most eyes in the global theatre industry continue to watch Australia for new musicals. Global Creatures‘ adaptation of King Kong, which has now opened in Melbourne to good reviews (again, not great, but still good) and playing to sell-out crowds. Because Kong can only (for the moment) be seen in Melbourne, a healthy portion of those crowds will be tourists. Producers have made it clear that if you want to see the production, you’ll have to travel to Melbourne and have even gone so far as to offer a money-back guarantee if the show opens anywhere else in Australia, unlike the country’s last must-see hit production of Love Never Dies which played in Melbourne then Sydney and became one of the top theatrical earners in Australia in 2012. Next year, Baz Luhrmann’s musical adaptation of Strictly Ballroom will have its world premiere in Sydney and is quickly becoming the next ‘show to watch.’

Adam Brazier and Chilina Kennedy star in the Charlottetown Festival’s world premiere production of EVANGELINE

The Stratford Festival is having a very good season, with over thirty thousand more tickets sold than last year and American tourism up %11 and climbing. When asked the reason for this, Stratford’s executive director Anita Gaffney credits the economic turnaround following the recession and, more importantly, the productions at Stratford that audiences “could not see closer to home.”

None of this happens in Toronto. The closest thing we’ve had to a large scale original musical since The Lord of the Rings was Theatre 20’s Bloodless: The Trial of Burke and Hare, a disaster on all fronts. Bloodless was a critical bloodbath and before it, The Lord of the Rings failed to find an audience following poor reviews and closed after a few short months. Neither company has produced an original, full-scale production since. While King Kong and Evangeline are enjoying success and wide-spread media attention as original musicals, Lord of the Rings and Bloodless’s poor reviews told tourists to stay away. Rings tried to condense three massive, well loved novels just coming off the success of three film adaptation into one three-hour stage production. Bloodless was praised for its cast but its book and music lacked cohesion and originality (even Theatre 20 kept comparing it to Sondheim’s Sweeny Todd) and the production was poorly directed by Theatre 20 Artistic Director Adam Brazier (who, coincidentally, is currently starring in Charlottetown’s Evangeline).

I can’t over emphasize how vital tourism is to the theatre industry, whether it’s a small-town summer theatre or a Broadway house (63% of Broadway audiences are tourists). Despite its importance, Toronto’s theatre tourism levels are shockingly and embarrassingly low.  Our theatre companies don’t seem to understand how important theatre tourism is, let alone why tourists are not sitting in their seats and they seem to be unwilling or unable to correct the problem. Toronto needs theatre companies that produce more quality original productions of new and existing shows. Shows that cannot be seen anywhere else and will run longer than two or three weeks by companies that know to market these shows not just outside of Toronto or the GTA, but outside of the province and country. Without doing what needs to be done to boost theatre tourism, Toronto theatre doesn’t stand a chance.