A recent announcement from Vancouver revealed that it is losing another theatre, the 1836-seat Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts. Originally built in the 90’s by Garth Drabinsky as the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts (a sort of West Coast sister to his North York theatre of the same name, now the Toronto Centre for the Arts), the venue was the temporary home to many Livent tours including Showboat, The Phantom of the Opera, Sunset Boulevard, Ragtime and others but like the theatre industry in Toronto fell victim to the Livent scandal and was eventually purchased by Four Brothers Entertainment in 2001, a company founded by four Hong Kong-born, Colorado-based brothers who started as doctors and real estate moguls, then dabbled in film and theatre production.
The announcement, which follows last year’s sudden closure of the Vancouver Playhouse, was accompanied by University of British Columbia theatre professor and theatre critic Jerry Wasserman’s testimony that the Centre’s loss (to be purchased by a religious organization and converted into a place of worship) is no big deal and won’t be missed because Vancouver already is home to two theatres over 2000 seats – the 2765-seat Queen Elizabeth Theatre and the historic, 2672-seat Orpheum (most famous as a filming location for the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series) – and couldn’t support all three barns. As part of his argument, he says “Vancouver is not New York, it’s not Toronto, it’s not Los Angeles, it’s not Chicago. Those are the kinds of cities that can accommodate more than one or two 2,000-seat theatres.” Well, news flash, Broadway doesn’t accommodate that large of theatre either. The average Broadway house is between 1000 and 1200 seats, the largest being the Foxwoods Theatre, home of Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark at 1900 seats. Toronto has the behemoth Sony Centre for the Performing Arts at 3191 seats, but that venue is more often used for concerts and special events than traditional theatre. The next largest theatre we have is the Ed Mirvish at 2300 seats followed by the Four Seasons Centre, used most of the year by the Canadian Opera Company and National Ballet of Canada, at 2071 and the Princess of Wales at an even 2000. The Ed Mirvish and the Princess of Wales are both owned by David Mirvish, Toronto’s only full-time commercial theatre producer, who is also claiming that we have too many theatres for the city to sustain in order to justify his decision to tear down the Princess of Wales to build condos. But wait a minute – The Ed Mirvish Theatre has been home to a sit down production of The Wizard of Oz all year with the new musical Disney’s Aladdin opening there in the fall before heading to Broadway and the Princess of Wales has been busy with a very well attended sit down production of War Horse followed by a sold out run of Book of Mormon which will be followed by Anything Goes this summer and a new, sit down production of Les Miserables starting in the fall, then return engagements of The Lion King and Mormon next year. Mirvish owns two other theatres – the Panasonic, which has been busy with the company’s Off-Mirvish subscription series as well as comedy shows and lectures and at the moment is the home for the new Toronto production of Cats, and the Royal Alexandra, which has been used to house… well… crap (and more crap), the only bright spot on its schedule is the upcoming tour stop of Once. So despite claims to the contrary, our theatres are pretty busy… at the moment at least.
Back out west, at the other end of the spectrum is Brent Belsher, a Vancouver producer and arts consultant who started a petition and Facebook page to have the City of Vancouver step in and block the sale of the Centre. He insists that the failure of the Centre was due to programming, which consisted of occasional productions created for the local Asian community with the intent to travel to Asia, annual presentations of The Nutcracker by the local Goh Ballet Academy and once in a while a concert or lecture, not the size or number of theatres in the city. Belsher is %100 correct. At 1800 seats in a city with a population of over 2 million (with millions more in the surrounding area, also being close to the US border), the Centre should be profitable if the owners have the industry knowledge to book productions that people want to see. The venue could easily out-perform the larger civic owned theatres in Vancouver but you can’t run a theatre of that size by targeting one demographic no matter what city you’re in. Four Brothers Entertainment could have been filling the theatre week after week with the many popular tours currently traveling the continent but looking at their bookings for the past year, a week of Rock of Ages over a year ago is the only Broadway tour they have hosted. There are many weeks, and even an entire month, where the venue has sat dark. The failure of the Centre lies not with the venue itself, but with the management who have been unwilling or lacked the knowledge to use the theatre to its full potential. Under a knowledgeable producer, the Centre could not only thrive but be a tent pole for the Vancouver performing arts industry.
Despite that, Wasserman continues his argument saying small theatres in the 350-seat range are the way to go, an argument also heard often here in Toronto. I’m tired of hearing it. On top of the several small-to-mid size venues Toronto already has, we are adding at least three new ones: The Theatre Centre and The Crow’s Theatre both are building new homes and The Daniels Spectrum in Regent Park opened late last year. Sure, these small theatres are great for community groups, small-time independent producers and non profit companies for short-run, low-budget productions and are important to a community’s arts and culture ecology, but small theatres alone cannot sustain or grow a city’s theatre industry. They do nothing to attract tourists (a vital demographic), their productions (with rare exceptions) don’t move on from their initial run (at least the ones Toronto is producing) nor do they earn the revenue required to afford artists a sustainable way of life. Big theatres, with the right programming, can do all of these things.
Here in Toronto, there is still the Mirvish venue monopoly, the threat of losing the Princess of Wales to unneeded condos and the local government is still trying to decide what to do with the civic-owned theatres. The Toronto Star’s Martin Knelman recently published an article arguing that of the three subsidized theatres, the city should save The Sony Centre “at any cost” and I agree %100. As he points out, not only do the two other theatres need more tax payer dollars than the Sony (Jim Roe of the St Lawrence Centre went on record saying the theatre he manages will never be self-sustaining, which is another blog altogether), but the Toronto Centre for the Arts will be sitting empty indefinitely now that Dancap no longer produces there (and is in a terrible location anyway) and the St Lawrence Centre, horribly outdated and unattractive, is being used less and less by resident company CanStage (who’s programming isn’t popular enough to fill the 876 seats these days). Instead it should be torn down and replaced with a better facility financed by a developer. A venue similar in style and size to Stratford’s Avon Theatre, free of CanStage’s implosion, would make a perfect addition to Toronto’s collection of theatres and would undoubtedly be the venue most sought after by producers. If only the Ontario Heritage Trust, owners of the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatres, would make their venues more affordable to rent, producers would have the freedom to present more shows that Toronto often misses out on and even make the city a place to launch new large-scale works again.
The Red Curtain 