Another Word on the Princess of Wales Theatre

The debate over David Mirvish’s plans to tear down the Princess of Wales Theatre and build three Frank Gehry-designed condo towers rages on. Well, not exactly raging. In fact, there seems to be more concern over the Edwardian-era warehouse-turned-offices that surround the theatre than there is over the state-of-the-art venue itself. Not surprising, considering this is Toronto.

Let me recap: In 2008, Dancap Productions entered into an agreement with Key Brand Entertainment to lease the Canon Theatre (formally the Pantages, now the Ed Mirvish) and the Panasonic Theatre after Mirvish allowed their leases to expire. Shortly after the announcement, the properties were sold to Mirvish, effectively cancelling Dancap’s lease and all but locking them out of the vital downtown Entertainment District. Less than five years later, Dancap is out of business and David Mirvish declares that Toronto has too many large theatres so he’ll be tearing down the much-loved Princess of Wales, less than 20 years old, to build three Frank Gehry-designed condo towers when the city already has an oversupply. I wrote a more detailed account of the events here if you haven’t already read it.

Now, there’s been a lot of praise for Gehry’s design of the proposed towers and there’s also been a lot of scorn. The designs are bold and artistic, and the aesthetic merits of the buildings or their effect on Toronto’s skyline is open to interpretation (beauty in the eye of the beholder and all that) and is not where my concern is.  My concern doesn’t even lie with the potential loss of the historic warehouse buildings along King Street. My concern lies solely with the Princess of Wales Theatre, and I seem to be the only one.

What people fail to realize is that losing the Princess of Wales means losing money from the city’s economy every year, money that new condos won’t replace. Theatre is the number one reason tourists travel to Toronto, according to the City of Toronto itself (page 4 of this document). A hit production such as Wicked or the currently-running Les Miserables can pump between $600-$800 million a year into the city’s economy primarily through tourism, not to mention 2000 jobs. All of that is apparently unneeded in Toronto. Or maybe we just want extra condos that much more. The Princess of Wales could have easily been included in the plans for the new towers or at least a similarly-sized replacement venue. Toronto-born Gehry, however, wanted a clean slate and doesn’t really believe in the historical preservation of buildings… unless they have something to do with him. And let’s be realistic here: we barely know what Toronto would be getting from these condos beyond it’s exterior design and stature. Mirvish is trying to sell the city on a few images alone, hoping they’re flashy enough to make city planners lose all foresight and reason and approve them without knowing all of the details. Trying to sell the project as an icon for the city only speaks to Mirvish’s motivations: creating his own legacy. A legacy that, by tearing down the Princess of Wales and selling Honest Ed’s to finance it, will come at the expense of his father’s (and doesn’t understand why Torontonians aren’t more appreciative to what he’s trying to do). As this article brilliantly summed it up, “…the real irony is if we truly want to build an icon for the city why are we destroying the iconic Princess of Wales Theatre in the process? That is what should be the Mirvish’s real heritage and legacy, for while it many not be braggy in its own exterior form, it is a place of great cultural value.” Great financial value too.

Toronto needs more large-scale theatre, not less. We need smarter programming to fill the theatres and better marketing to promote them. We need commercial theatre tax credits to lure more producers to Toronto with their productions and the tourist spending that come with them. I’m the first to admit that Toronto needs more architectural interest beyond the common glass towers that are quickly rising from the streets, but tearing down the city’s best and only barrier-free large theatre to build condos isn’t the way to do it.

“The prime distaste is for the bizarre waste involved in tearing down a perfectly good building that is fewer than 20 years old. And the secondary frustration is the hypocrisy of Mirvish having aggressively fought his chief competitor for the right to purchase the Canon and Panasonic theatres on Yonge, in order to acquire a monopoly on downtown venues — only now to turn around and declare that there’s an excess of theatre space. Which there is, but only because his competitor, having been locked out of downtown venues, went out of business.”

Jonathan Goldsbie, staff writer at NOW magazine, in a round-table discussion in the National Post concerning the impending destruction of the Princess of Wales Theatre to make way for condos.

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Another One Bites the Dust… Sort of.

Word broke yesterday that Toronto is losing another large theatre: The 1800-seat Toronto Centre for the Arts. The silver lining around this news is that it won’t go the way of the Princess of Wales Theatre, which is disappearing completely, but instead the building’s largest-of-three venues will be divided into two smaller spaces – a 350 seat studio space named the Stage Tower Theatre (because it will occupy the space that is currently the stage) and the 600-seat Lyric Theatre (because it sounds pretty). Once completed, The Toronto Centre for the Arts will be made up of four performing arts spaces ranging in size from a 200-seat studio space to a 1036-seat concert hall.

The TCA’s history has been bumpy, to say the least. Originally built in 1993 by then-mayor Mel Lastman and Toronto’s reigning theatre mogul at the time, Garth Drabinsky, the Centre has always had problems drawing an audience because theatre-goers preferred a night downtown, not north of the city in the ‘burbs. Even major productions like Livent’s Showboat, Sunset Boulevard and Ragtime and Dancap’s Jersey Boys struggled.

In a city where the commercial theatre industry is monopolized by a company that has all but choked the life out of any chance of being a theatre destination again, the demand for smaller venues increased by small-time wannabe producers looking to indulge themselves and the city’s many, many non-profit companies who all produce the same obscure type of theatre that can’t fill a larger house. While there are some great things being done in Toronto’s smaller venues, there is very little to drive theatre tourism or maintain a viable way of life for artists. That being said, more available small and mid-sized venues will hopefully mean more productions and those small companies that have a good management team will have the opportunity to grow.

It is sad and disheartening that in one year alone, Toronto has learned that it is losing two of its major venues. At the end of the day, however, the retrofitting of the Toronto Centre for the Arts  is a smart move. While the changes to the TCA are designed to be reversible should the need for an 1800-seat venue arise again, the Centre’s location alone assures that such a need never will. Not in North York.  If Toronto wants its commercial theatre industry to thrive again, it needs to focus downtown.

Why There Should Be Commercial Theatre Tax Credits in Ontario.

Every year, dozens of Hollywood projects, big and small, shoot in Toronto. Films such as Chicago, American Psycho, Resident Evil, X-Men, Good Will Hunting, Hairspray and The Mortal Instruments movies are just a sample of the big screen projects using this city as a backdrop. American television shows shoot here as well. Suits, Hannibal, Covert Affairs, Hemlock Grove, Nikita, Beauty and the Beast, Defiance and the upcoming Reign are all currently in production along side home-grown Canadian tv programs like Orphan Black, The Listener, Murdock Mysteries, Flashpoint, Being Erica, Satisfaction, Rookie Blue and Cracked. 

Most of these productions are, at least in part, drawn to Toronto by the generous tax credits offered by the province of Ontario to Canadian and foreign production companies who film here.  Producers are offered up to a 37% credit on labour, 25% on production costs (including post-production), and up to another 20% on animation and special effects meaning producers could save millions of dollars. For the city, it means even more millions pumped into the local economy and the creation of jobs. It is a win-win incentive for the producers, studios and the city.

The tax incentives have been so successful that Toronto has become  North America’s third busiest film industry hub, leading to the creation of Pinewood Toronto Studios in 2008, a facility that has been in such high demand that they have already announced a $40 million expansion. The credits have also bolstered our own industry, with several new, independent Canadian production companies opening shop since the tax breaks became available.

Imagine, then, what similar tax incentives would do for Toronto’s struggling commercial theatre industry. In the past couple of years, two U.S. states have introduced significant tax breaks for commercial theatre producers in order to lure productions to their cities and it has been working. The State of Illinois is offering up to $2 million in tax credits on long running (min. 8 weeks) or pre-Broadway, for-profit productions in theatres with at least 1200 seats. The State of Louisiana’s incentives are more encompassing, extending not just to sit-down theatre productions, but tours and concerts as well as the purchase and/or restoration of a performance venue with credits between 25 and 35 percent of expenses.

Toronto currently offers nothing and it shows. Despite Dancap’s heavy investment in The Addam’s Family, the tour launched in New Orleans, Louisiana (although Toronto did see a brief tour stop much later) and the much hyped Prince of Broadway, originally to debut here with lead producer Dancap, decided to bypass Toronto altogether due to rising costs. The production has since been scrapped altogether. Current Broadway hit Kinky Boots opted to have a pre Broadway try-out in Chicago specifically because of the tax breaks available there.

The bottom line is, a tax incentive for commercial theatre productions can be more financially rewarding for Toronto than those offered to film productions. Seriously. A movie chooses Toronto as the location to film. Cast and crew move to town for a few weeks, even a couple of months, to shoot. Money is spent on local crews, actors, accommodations, and equipment. Lots of money. The film wraps, the job is done and a few months later when the film is released, the profits go to Hollywood. In the case of a commercial theatre production opening in Toronto, the production runs for months, if not years.  Jobs are created for local crews and actors for much longer periods. Profits mostly, if not entirely, stay in Toronto and then there is the added benefit of tourism. People travel to a city to see theatre and while here stay in hotels, eat in restaurants and go shopping. One long-running show could add $600-$800 million a year to the local economy. One. Show. And a commercial tax credit wouldn’t just help existing producers, but lure new ones. We could see the return of Dancap. We could see one of the several smaller producers in Toronto try a bigger production. Imagine if Toronto had two hit shows each running for two years. That’s over TWO BILLION DOLLARS pumped into our economy.

THAT’s the power of theatre. That’s why we need to do everything we can to attract large commercial sit-down productions and the tourists to come see them.

“When a city has an exciting theatre scene, it’s an exciting city”

Richard Ouzounian, theatre critic for the Toronto Star

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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.

“The fact is that companies are struggling just to survive and find an audience – the way not to get them is to do weird-ass shit,”

SoulPepper Artistic Director, Albert Schultz on The Canadian Stage Company’s dramatic decline in audience after a recent change in mandate

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Theatres of Toronto #4

Avon Theatre – 1090 seats. Part of the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario. Originally built as the Theatre Albert, a vaudeville house opening in 1901. By the 1950’s was used almost exclusively as a movie theatre. Purchased by the Stratford Festival in 1963 and, over the years, extensively renovated culminating in a massive renewal project completed in 2002 with the structure as it stands today – one of the best live theatre venues in the province. Sadly, most famous for being the theatre where Justin Bieber sat busking on the front steps before finding fame.

Photo by Terry Manzo

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Theatres of Toronto #3

The Elgin Theatre 1561 seats. Built in 1913, it will celebrate  its 100th birthday on October 7th this year. Flagship of Marcus Loew’s legendary theatre chain. National Historic Site along with the Winter Garden Theatre upstairs and together are the last of the ‘Double Decker’ theatres in the world. Used in several scenes of the film adaptation of Chicago. Venue for the Toronto International Film Festival. Home of the original Canadian production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats before it was closed for restoration in the 80’s. Also home of the original Canadian production of The Who’s Tommy and world premiere of Napoleon in the 90’s

Photo by Edith Levy

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A Tale of Two Cities’ Venue Problems

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.