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.

Too Many Theatres or Not Enough Companies?

The Princess of Wales Theatre

A bomb went off in Toronto this past weekend.

I originally started this post about Mirvish Productions’ announcement of their new “Off-Mirvish” subscription series; four smaller, fringe-esque productions to compliment their current season of large-scale musicals. Something about the company’s new endeavour set my spider-sense tingling, however, and I was dragging my heels on writing it waiting for the other shoe to drop. And drop it did.

Martin Knelman of the Toronto Star leaked the news that plans were underway for David Mirvish to demolish the Princess of Wales Theatre and build three Frank Gehry-designed, 80-storey condominium towers in it’s place. The theatre community was stunned.

The venue, not even 20 years old and widely considered to be the city’s best theatre was built in 1993 by David and his father, Ed Mirvish, to house a sit-down production of Miss Saigon. The Mirvishes went to the trouble of obtaining royal assent to name the venue in honour of the now-late Diana, Princess of Wales and opened the theatre to great fanfare. Over ten thousand square feet of mural was commissioned especially for the new venue and it is believed to be one of the largest mural installations in modern times. The theatre was designed to be not only state-of-the-art but completely barrier-free, a rarity in Toronto because of the age of its other theatres. To solve the lack of parking in the area, the theatre was constructed over a new multi-level parking garage dug eight stories into the earth below. A lot of trouble and expense went into building a theatre that David now insists was always meant to be a temporary venue. Over the years, the venue was also home to Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Les Miserables, The Lord of the Rings, The Sound of Music among others and is the current home to the Canadian production of War Horse.

In 2008, David Mirvish expanded his theatre empire with the purchase of the Panasonic and the Canon theatres, recently renaming the Canon to the Ed Mivish Theatre in honour of his father who passed away in 2007. The theatres had already been controlled by Mirvish Productions but the company allowed their lease to expire. Mirvish’s then-competitor, Dancap Productions, announced they had acquired control of the venues from owners Key Brand Entertainment. Shortly after the announcement, the theatres were suddenly sold to Mirvish, who had right of first negotiation. The landlord’s conveniently-timed decision to sell the venues to Mirvish effectively cancelled Dancap’s deal, severely crippling the company and solidifying Mirvish’s monopoly in the theatre district. Four years later, Dancap productions has gone out of business and David Mirvish is suddenly claiming that Toronto has too many theatres in order justify the demolition of the Princess of Wales to accommodate a lucrative condo project. With the PoW gone, David says his company will make use of the under-utilized Elgin and Winter Garden theatres. Mirvish’s noose around the neck of Toronto theatre tightens. By destroying his own venue and using the Elgin and Winter Garden, Toronto no longer has any available, suitable theatres for other commercial producers to use (please don’t mention the Sony Centre or the Toronto Centre. The former is far too big, the latter is outside of the downtown core and has trouble attracting an audience, regardless of what’s produced there). The Mirvish monopoly is complete and unchallengeable.

What makes the situation even worse is that not only does it send a message to the world that Toronto can’t support a healthy commercial theatre industry, but even many within it are starting to believe it themselves. Technically, no city can. 63% of Broadway audiences are made up of tourists. One in four are from outside the country. That’s not the case for Toronto. Since the collapse of Livent and the SARS outbreak a few years later, less than 1% of the city’s audiences are reportedly from across the border. To say that Toronto should just give up and settle for mediocre – the imported short-run tours and small, fringe productions that cannot and do not draw wide audiences – only sell the city, it’s theatre industry and it’s people short. We need theatre that will draw in tourists and the current offering will not. Why travel to Toronto to see Sister Act when it’s playing in a city closer to home next month? Why come to Toronto to see the revival of Anything Goes when you just saw it in your own city a few weeks ago? Toronto needs less tours and more original productions. Let’s see a new Canadian staging of Follies or City of Angels or a completely new musical that appeals to theatre lovers (and the general public), regardless of which side of the border they’re on. Let’s make our productions original so that we can draw tourists to our city and our seats. Stratford is attracting %30 of their audience from the US every season because their productions are not touring clones. They are new stagings that can only be seen at the festival. Americans are willing to cross the border (despite the high Canadian dollar and new passport rules) to see great theatre, not carbon-copy productions.

Once upon a time, Toronto productions were mostly original. The musicals running in the city were either world premieres or our own productions of existing hits presented by either Livent or Mirvish. It was the Glory Days of Toronto theatre. Many feel that because of Garth Drabinsky’s book-cooking, the city’s entire industry was a sham. I strongly disagree. Sure, things weren’t as great as they seemed but even though there were some shows that were failing, there were others that were legitimately successful. There was no faking the global media attention Toronto was receiving for it’s theatre, attention that is non existent today. When Livent ceased operations, Mirvish went on unchallenged for many years. The emphasis changed from presenting original Toronto productions to presenting touring productions, an easier, cheaper and safer bet. David wanted to be the sole Toronto commercial producer and he was for most of the past fifteen years. When a new challenger named Aubrey Dan came on the scene, David saw fit to purchase additional theatres from under his competitor and force him out of the downtown core. So if there’s anyone to blame for Toronto’s current commercial theatre crisis, it’s David Mirvish himself.

Toronto doesn’t have too many theatres. Mirvish does. What Toronto lacks is commercial theatre companies to run them.

State of the Union

(Originally posted July 30, 2011. Updated May 12, 2012)

I’m just going to jump right in and point out the elephant in the room: the Toronto theatre industry is in the crapper.

While many have agreed with me, there are many others who do not. From the group who disagree I have heard many times that we should be thankful for what we’ve got.

Should we?

Twenty years ago, the theatre landscape in this city was very different. Mirvish was around then but they weren’t the big guys in town – Livent was. Remember them? In those days, Livent was the company bringing us big budget musicals such as a revival of Joseph and the Amazing Colour Dreamcoat (starring Donnie Osmond), Show Boat, Kiss of the Spiderwoman (starring Chita Rivera), Ragtime, Fosse, Sunset Boulevard and most famously, The Phantom of the Opera (starring Colm Wilkinson). During the same time, Mirvish had productions of Les Miserables, Miss Saigon, Crazy for You, Beauty and the Beast, The Who’s Tommy and Rent. Toronto was a breeding ground for many exciting new musicals: Showboat, Spiderwoman, Ragtime and Fosse all had their roots in the city, starting life here and going on to award winning runs on Broadway and in the West End. If you wanted to know the next season’s Broadway hits, you just had to look at Toronto. Unfortunately, in one of the biggest corporate corruption scandals Toronto has ever seen, Livent fell and so too fell the city’s industry. Even the Phantom juggernaut couldn’t escape Livent’s collapse.

With its rival gone, Mirvish carried on as the sole commercial theatre company in Toronto. Between 2000 and 2005, they presented Canadian productions of The Lion King, The Producers, Hairspray and Mamma Mia! Both The Producers and Hairspray surprisingly flopped. In 2006 Mirvish announced they would be producing a new show based on JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, with an astronomical budget of $30 million (at the time, the most expensive musical ever staged, anywhere). The show would have its world premiere at the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto. The media attention was intense; many thought the project would revitalize Toronto’s theatre industry but some, myself included, felt the project was too ambitious (three novels adapted into one stage production?) and too expensive (30 mil may work on Broadway, but in Toronto?) to succeed. By all accounts visually stunning, the production had a running time well over the three-hour golden rule for theatre, and failed to capture the essence of Tolkien’s novels. The show closed a few months later, a critical and financial failure. The production was trimmed down, reworked and moved to London’s West End where it found slightly better success but was still not a hit. Lord of the Rings marked the last time any new large-scale production premiered in Toronto and Mirvish’s seasons since then have consisted mainly of touring productions.

The following year a new commercial theatre company was formed in the city, Dancap Productions. Founded by Aubrey Dan, their first season included shows like The Drowsy Chaperone (A Canadian musical), The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and Avenue Q along with a of new production of My Fair Lady which the company brought to Toronto from London’s West End. Their productions since have been brief and irregular.

In the 90′s, we were the city to be watched in the global theatre community. Today, we’re little more than a tour stop. Is this the fault of the theatre companies in the city? Or is Toronto no longer willing or able to support long-running musicals?

Two recent productions, Billy Elliot and The Railway Children – both produced by Mirvish – were expected to be long-running, open ended shows. Billy Elliot opened in January with Elton John (the show’s composer) in the audience  to rave reviews. Word-of-mouth was also great, most saying it was Toronto’s ‘must-see’ show of the year. Within a few months, a closing date of September 3 was announced. Before it came to Toronto, it played in Chicago and suffered a similar fate despite being a hit both on Broadway and in the West End. The Railway Children arrived in Toronto amid a lot of buzz, with a custom tent-theatre being built to house it (and the real locomotive used in the production). Reviews for the show, which opened in May, were on the positive side of mixed. Word-of-mouth wasn’t as great. The show posted a closing date of August 14.

So what went wrong? Some say Mirvish is depending too heavily on the population of Toronto and not doing enough marketing outside the city, let alone the country. A fair point, if it’s true. Even with 5.5 million people in the Greater Toronto Area, without marketing your productions outside the region you’re going to run out of customers sooner rather than later. Even Broadway, the world’s largest theatre industry, relies heavily on tourists.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Ontario’s non-profit theatre sector is doing fairly well. SoulPepper Theatre, located in Toronto’s Distillery District, continues to stage shows that are almost always unanimously well reviewed and get good word-of-mouth; attendance is high. The Canadian Stage Company (CanStage) has recently changed its mandate and has begun producing more international performing arts pieces that haven’t always been well received by critics or audiences. However that company, making its home at the St Lawrence Centre for the Arts, was just outed by the Toronto Star for hiring an architect firm to examine whether or not it would be better to either extensively renovate or demolish the St Lawrence entirely and start anew. Things can’t be that bad for CanStage. Outside of Toronto proper, the Shaw Festival also announced expansion and is adding a new venue in the next few years, although they too have been struggling the past couple of seasons. Stratford had a phenomenal season in 2011 (even better than the year before) with their new production of Jesus Christ Superstar such a critical and financial smash hit that they extended an extra week before transferring to California’s LaJolla Playhouse for a brief run before transferring again to Broadway.

So why is the non-profit sector doing so well while the commercial sector is floundering? Is tourism is playing a major role?  A non-profit theatre company like Stratford relies heavily on tourism. All of their productions are original, not seen anywhere else while Toronto’s commercial theatres are filled with carbon-copy productions on tour that have been, or will be, seen in nearby cities like Buffalo. Folks just aren’t going to buy tickets and travel to Toronto to see a show that is also playing closer to home. In the Livent days, audiences were coming from the four corners of the continent to see our productions. Why? Because Garth new how to sell – to those here in Toronto and elsewhere. All Livent shows in Toronto were either world premieres (Ragtime, Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Fosse) or had starred a big name (Colm Wilkinson’s Phantom, Dihann Caroll’s Norma Desmond, Donnie Osmond’s Joseph). Neither Mirvish or Dancap has been pulling this off in recent years. Mirvish’s The Lord of the Rings was their biggest effort but was not well thought out. It was one of those things that seemed like a good idea in the beginning but the novels just weren’t a body of work that could be adapted to the stage (which is a shame, because it has some really great moments, like here). Dancap is taking a gamble next year with their first brand new, original musical based on the life and work of Hal Prince.

Hopefully it will be the first of many.