(Online editor's note: This is a companion piece to the Elks Theatre story Steven Ayres writes in our most recent issue. To find the hardcopy, go to www.pickup.readitnews.com.)

Live shows are expensive, and popular live shows are more expensive. People don't come back because tickets are cheap, they come back because they get an experience they can't get for free on TV, and they can trust the theatre to provide a certain level of quality of that experience.

A theatre can offer a pretty broad range of experiences -- dramatic productions, rock bands, chatauquas and lectures, dance, illusions, symphony, school talent shows, commencements, church services, town meetings, what have you. These experiences can be locally generated or brought in from out of town.

A commercial theatre manager has to balance the interests of the audience, the wildly varying economic prospects of each possible show, available stage time, and the physical and technical limitations of the house to determine what to put on offer. Then you get going on marketing and hope the people will show up.

Would you like to see famous or sort-of-famous people on stage at the Elks? I would. Let me give you an example of how that works. 

Book 'em – if you can

Say you want to bring in a middling-famous but no longer top-tier country-music act remembered only by older people. The star brings a five-piece band on a single tour bus. It's a relatively light act, easy to stage. Among other details his standard contract requires two high-quality sound systems (one for the house, one for the stage), about 25 microphones of a certain quality, dressed risers to stand on, a controlled lighting system, a professional setup and running crew, one catered meal for his people, nice dressing rooms with showers, and a place to park the bus adjacent to the stagehouse. His guaranteed fee is $18,000 plus a cut of sales above minimum. Depending on how many people show up, the house gets the gravy or eats the deficit.

Could something like this work at the Elks? Start with physical and technical limitations. The City might let him park the bus blocking the alley, it might not. The Elks sound and lighting systems are patched-together junk. The sound can be hired in, at substantial cost, and a dedicated lighting techie with nerves of steel - because the lighting positions are not safely accessible - can probably get the lights in shape for a simple turn-'em-on, turn-em'-off music program. The risers can be rented. Despite a recent coat of paint and an attempt to expand them, what's left of the cramped dressing rooms under the stage would never pass muster. Maybe you can get around that with a couple of nearby hotel suites and a driver. 

Doing the dollars

Okay, now let's talk economics. You've got about 575 seats to sell. Let's say you can keep your sound, crew, catering, rental, talent and incidental costs down to $25,000. That puts your break-even, full-house ticket price at almost $45, you haven't even started on advertising, and you haven't paid your utility bills or your manager. Forget it, won't work.

How about local productions, say the Shakespeare festival?

Dramatic productions fully use a theatre. Good lighting is crucial. The system for lifting scenery must be fast, strong and silent or it is essentially useless. The stage manager needs space offstage for cast, costumes, props, scenery and equipment. With people and big things moving around, safety is essential.

The Elks stage is what we call a melodrama drop house. It was built for traveling shows that carried their own scenery, almost entirely in the form of flat painted fabric drops. These were hung from a rope-block-and-pinrail system, much like you'd find on a sailing ship, operated by brute force. For heavier pieces you attach a sandbag to the rope to help you move it. If a rope gets away from you, everything comes crashing to the floor. This is the fly system at the Elks today. Early on the City had the sense to replace the ropes holding up the heavy lighting with steel cable, and after a couple of years one enterprising producer managed to nag the City into replacing the rest of the dry old ropes that had been hanging for probably forty years, but there have been no other improvements. To be fair, replacing that system with something useful is a very big engineering job.

There is literally no useful offstage space for scenery.  So with flies that don't work and no offstage, staging options are sharply limited.

Theatre designers and technicians are resourceful, adaptable and creative, and they can find ways to make the stage work. Getting around the lighting system is a bigger deal. Despite these hassles and hazards, people do put shows in there.

Now back to economics. You've decided from hard-won experience that your prospective audience won't pay more than $15 to see your show. Again, you've got 575 seats, making maximum gross revenue of $8625 per show, and the festival runs two weekends with nine shows. By selling every single seat you could bring in almost $78,000. In 2000, when I was production manager for Arizona Classical Theatre, our annual budget, including personnel, construction, marketing, many incidentals, and rehearsal space and venue that cost essentially nothing, was close to $80,000. You've sold every seat, a massive success, and you can't make your light bill, leave alone pay any rental to the theatre, which has been tied up with this one production for at least a month. 

Back to movies

How about films? With some improvements to the sound system, a decent digital projector and repairs to the seats and screen, the Elks could be a nice, nostalgic place to see a movie. At seven bucks a seat, a full house could make over $4000 per show. It's been a long time since I've seen a full movie house, but if you keep your personnel to a minimum and run programs that don't cost much, by focusing on film you might squeak out the economics. It comes as no surprise, then, that after World War I, as movies became a substantial medium, the managers of the Elks did exactly that, and within a couple of decades stage productions there essentially ceased.