Staging A Turnaround
By Scott Suttell, Crain’s Cleveland Business

Charles Fee has spent his life in the arts and the last few years giving new vigor to the performances at Great Lakes Theater Festival. So it’s a little startling to hear how easily corporate-sounding phrases like “extending the life of the product” and “changing the distribution model” roll off his tongue.

But given the recent track record on financial and organizational matters at Great Lakes which opened its 45th season over the weekend, maybe that language shouldn’t be surprising at all.

When Mr. Fee took over as Great Lakes’ artistic director in June 2002, the company had an accumulated deficit of $1.06 million, according to executive director Bob Taylor. As of June 30, 2006, Great Lakes had an accumulated surplus of $44,000 – small potatoes in corporate Cleveland, perhaps, but representative of a huge swing in fortunes in the tightly budgeted world of arts organizations these days.

“We got together as a team and said, ‘The (financial) model we’re working on is not efficient,’” Mr. Fee said in an interview.

Messrs. Fee and Taylor, working with the Great Lakes’ board of directors put together a turnaround plan that combined a reworking of how a theater company operates – that’s the “changing the distribution model” part, and it involves cooperation with the Idaho Shakespeare Festival in Boise – with more old-fashioned strategies of staff reduction, aggressive fund raising and courting of foundations for support.

“You can’t be afraid of experimenting,” Mr. Fee said.

Part of the experience has involved sharing productions with the Boise company, where Mr. Fee serves in a similar capacity. In the labor-intensive world of live theater, Mr. Fee said, staging plays during separate seasons enables both the Cleveland and Boise companies to reduce costs.

“There’s a real challenge with the traditional model of staging plays unless you’re in a big city or destination place.” Mr. Fee said.

Hi-ho Idaho
This year Idaho is sending to Cleveland its productions of the Stephen Sondheim musical “A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum” and “Love’s Labour’s Lost” which began this past weekend and run in repertory through October 21 at the Ohio Theatre in Playhouse Square.

In turn, Great Lakes’ spring productions of the Noel Coward comedy “Hay Fever” and “The Tempest” will make the journey west next summer to Boise, which stages plays in a striking outdoor setting. Great Lakes’ fifth show in the 2006-2007 season is the audience-pleasing “A Christmas Carol,” running Nov. 24 through Dec. 23.

The set up is good financially for both companies, Mr. Fee said, and it provides the audience with better quality productions because cast members have more time to perfect their work.

“Rather than working for five weeks and then having to market themselves to find something new, they get to continue the work in a different place,” Mr. Fee said. “For the actors, it’s like having one company with two venues in different places.” (So entwined are those places that in the Great Lakes offices in downtown, the bathroom keychain is in the shape of a potato.)

The Cleveland/Boise relationship and its resulting cost savings went a long way to making sure Great Lakes has been able to operate with a balanced budget for four consecutive seasons, Mr. Taylor said. Staff cuts have helped – the company has 13 administrative staff members now, about half the number from when Mr. Fee arrived – as has a closer relationship with Playhouse Square Center, operator of the Ohio Theatre.

For instance, Mr. Taylor said, Playhouse Square staffers now handle all box-office issues for Great Lakes, rather than the theater company using a dedicated staff for those functions.

Thinking outside our four walls on how we could do business has been very helpful,” Mr. Taylor said.

So has a board of trustees that Mr. Fee said has worked through “a really brutal period” in the last decade for the arts in general and in Northwest Ohio in particular.

Last June Great Lakes launched a $500,000 working capital campaign, which Mr. Taylor said was completed in six months. The campaign was bolstered by a $200,000 grant from The Cleveland Foundation. As a result of the campaign, Mr. Taylor said, Great Lakes “is able to manage its cash flow needs from an asset position rather than a bank line of credit.”

Board’s on board
Timothy K. Pistell, a co-chairman of the Great Lakes board as well as chief financial officer of diversified manufacturer Parker Hannifin Corp., said the board and Great Lakes administrative staff have worked closely to in forging a strategy that is working well financially and artistically.

“It really has been a collaborative effort,” said Mr. Pistell, a board member for 12 years. “Charlie certainly was a catalyst for change. He brought in a good balanced approach that recognized that with limited resources, we needed to leverage the assets of Great Lakes differently. I think it has paid off well in all respects, including with the productions that people see.”

Indeed the company reports that attendance grew 21% in the 2005-2006 season from the previous year. So far this year, Great Lakes subscription campaign is 17% ahead of last year in terms of tickets sold.

Mr. Fee has another big goal for Great Lakes: a home to call its own.

“We need to create a total experience for our work and our company from the moment you leave your car to when you get back in the car,” Mr. Fee said. “In order to achieve that we probably need to develop our own space.”

It’s “very early” Mr. Fee said, but Great Lakes officials have the go-ahead from Playhouse Square to come up with a plan to convert the Hanna Theatre to a 500-seat thrust stage that would provide the company with a more intimate home than the 1,000-seat Ohio.

There’s no guarantee a remake of the Hanna will happen, but such a setting would “recapture what was vibrant in Shakespeare’s day,” Mr. Fee said.