Perfect storm

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/09/2005 (7573 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

GOOD News?

Rainbow Stage’s pot of gold — a year ago brimming with $500,000 — is empty in the wake of the poorest single show attendance in its 51-year history.

“We’re tapped,” Campbell McIntyre, Rainbow’s financial director, said yesterday. “We just decimated our cash reserve. We did a Doug Henning on it, poof, it was gone.

“This is a huge setback. Now we’re back to square one.”

No one can remember any Rainbow production — no one in the organization is anxious to find out — that came in below the 13,500 in single-ticket sales (a couple of sponsor nights brings total paid attendance to near 16,000) recorded by the flapper-era football musical Good News, which closed Sunday. That represents a paltry 25 per cent of capacity at Kildonan Park. No performance drew close to a half-house at the 2,280-seat facility.

Compare that to the turnout of 45,000 for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat only two years ago when the Rainbow reserve fund was worth $700,000. After spending $200,000 on a sound-system upgrade under the dome, the rest disappeared due to a head-scratching, three-show box-office losing streak.

Company brass is devastated at how the glowing promise of a healthy bank account — and the prospect of adding to it with the surpluses from two surefire winners, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Miss Saigon — evaporated in 10 months.

Beauty lost an unexpected $50,000 before Miss Saigon was a misfire, cashing out at another $100,000 loss. That dynamic duo — numbers 6 and 7 on Broadway’s all-time longest-run list — were supposed to offset any financial trouble the no-name Good News might get into. But no one foresaw Good News bleeding $325,000 of red ink over its books.

From the time the box office opened on Good News, Winnipeg audiences proved cool to the rah-rah college campus comedy, snapping up only 5,000 tickets before opening night, when three times that number could be expected. Management had low-balled its sales expectations to 25,000, well under the previous summer’s paid attendance for The King and I of 36,000.

“I think Good News is a blip,” says Rainbow board president Laurie Fischer. “There was a whole series of factors at work. It was the perfect storm of musical theatre.”

He blames going head-to-head against the musical monster Mamma Mia!, the entertainment-dollar vacuum that is the MTS Centre concert schedule, confusion over Rainbow’s relationship to Danny Schur’s Strike!, the ill-timed introduction of its own box office, and Good News‘ obscure title.

Having lost much of its wiggle room with a depleted reserve, the company’s head honchos have placed its entire operation under the microscope.

Its officials have even talked about abandoning Kildonan Park and consolidating year-round at the downtown Pantages Playhouse Theatre.

“Yes, it’s been thought about,” Fischer says. “Everything is being considered. It’s expensive out there. There is no doubt that the staging of shows outdoors is more expensive than indoors. But we wouldn’t want anyone to get the idea that we are leaving Kildonan Park.”

In the immediate crosshairs for Fischer et al. is the over-reliance on box-office revenue. A board priority is to decrease the 95 per cent of the budget that comes from ticket sales through grants and sponsorships.

“When we had a competitive analysis done with other organizations you could see we weren’t getting our share if you are talking about the city or the province,” says Fischer, whose daughter Rachel was one of the stars of Good News. “For an organization that’s been around five decades, we were not getting our share. Now the focus is that, like everyone else, we get our share.”

A well-timed cash infusion is the $62,000 recently received first instalment from the Manitoba Arts Stabilization Program. That working capital grant will act as seed money and cash flow to get the coming season off the ground.

“I’d say we’re financially challenged,” says Fischer. “The timing of the first year (Arts Stabilization) money is great. We don’t have as much of a reserve as we’d like to have but there’s definitely enough to go forward.”

And that’s where Rainbow is focused. On the weekend it offered season subscriptions for the first time. Patrons can reserve tickets for a very appealing 2005-06 playbill consisting of the musical revue Smokey Joe’s Cafe (Nov. 1-20) and the Tony Award-winning Urinetown (Feb. 21-March 12), both at Pantages, and the ever-popular The Wizard of Oz in Kildonan Park (Aug. 1-27).

Fischer does take some solace that it was Good News that stiffed and not one of its name musicals that have been favourites of Rainbow fans in the past.

“I think if that had happened to The Wizard of Oz, we’d really have to look at the competitive environment and say, ‘Is Rainbow Stage still part of it?’ I believe that it is.”

The last time Rainbow slipped into the teens for a summer show was when 17,500 people attended A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1991. Funny Thing was also followed by The Wizard of Oz, where the pre-sale was over 14,500, or more than the single-ticket sales for the entire run of Good News this month.

“I firmly believe that by the time we get to next summer that families will come swarming out to The Wizard of Oz,” he says. “I think it has always been one of our more successful shows.”

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca

A Rainbow ride

February 2002 — Fame: The first winter show

to make money records a $25,000 surplus.

August 2002 — West Side Story: A top draw earns a $200,000 profit, half of which is diverted to upgrade the wonky sound system.

August 2003 — Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat: The first musical to crack $1 million in ticket revenue gains $200,000 for the Rainbow coffers.

February 2004 — Chicago: Sells out and adds another

$100,000 to the pot that is stuffed with $500,000.

November 2004 — Beauty and the Beast: Good crowds

no match for big budget, leaving $50,000 loss.

February 2005 — Miss Saigon: No Ma-Anne Dionisio,

no box-office bonanzo. Another $100,000 in the red.

August 2005 — Good News: Roadkill left behind

by the box office behemoth Mamma Mia! wipes out the last $325,000 in the Rainbow reserve.