Part 2: Troupes trying to reach young and distant audiences

By Mike Desmond
(Image above: original image is from artist rendering – Unity Design Studio)

Tim Jennngs is CEO and executive director of the Shaw Festival.

He used to run two of the biggest children’s theaters in the U.S. His wife is an award-winning stage milliner. He has a 25-year-old son, clearly raised in a theatrical world. Yet Jennings can see some of the challenges live theater faces through the eyes of his son.

Jennings’s job is to pay the bills and sell more tickets to the shifting array of Shaw theaters.

He recently told a public session with supporters of the festival in a Buffalo private club there is a range of efforts underway to get more people in seats.

That’s people of all ages, with theaters around the U.S. and Canada seeing that the highest percentage of increasing customers is over 80.

Clearly that’s a self-limiting crowd so there are efforts in two other areas: young people and those who might have trouble getting to Niagara-on-the-Lake.

One answer to the second starts starts in the fall, with Shaw productions on the stage of the Fleck at Harbourfront Centre Theatre. That’s on Toronto’s Waterfront and served by TTC trolleys and major highways.

The Shaw deal calls for at least three years of stage productions in the Toronto complex, including “A Christmas Carol.”

Jennings is very aware of the need to bring younger audiences and efforts are expanding, under the mantra of “Every Kid in Niagara.”

He’s aware of what can be done since the Stratford Festival has a long history of young audiences and if you have ever been to one of those, you notice the effect on young people of the pageantry of theatre and its relevance.

Years ago, I reviewed a student performance of “Romeo & Juliet” at Stratford and you noticed a raucous teen crowd grow silent as the story unfurled and became relevant.

Jennings points to a program in Guelph, Ont., which puts every school kid in an arts event every year.

“That project’s been running for 27 years,” he said. “Every kid of more than a million kids have gone through this program and they are the most invested arts city in Canada. And we want to do it in Niagara.”

Jennings made a point of telling this audience that young visitors to NOTL include those from Buffalo’s Say Yes program.

He says this absence of younger audience members isn’t new,: “George Bernard Shaw complained about it himself quite loudly and saying: I don’t understand why we don’t have more young people coming to the theater.”

The Shaw executive says he sees the situation of younger adults and theatre in his own son.

“He loves theater but as he said to me a while ago: ‘It’s like, it just would be hard for me to find time right now in university and I’m going to start my job and I don’t know that I’ll have, like evenings, to do that,'” he said. “‘And, even if I did, I’ve got another social life and that social life is probably what I’ll lean into and unless they’re all going too. Right?’”

Jennings makes the key point that there are fairly low-cost tickets available to shows, particularly if you order early.

Reaching back into his own history in children’s theater, he said, “I spent my whole 10 years in the children’s theatre world trying to figure this exact same thing out and what I found was young people go to the theater. People over 50 go to the theater. The middle ground is the hardest place.”

For Shaw, that audience-building effort has included a more culturally varied panoply of shows, which that has resulted in an audience perhaps more reflective of Canada’s increasingly varied population, shows like “The Orphan of Chao,” the “Mahabharata” and James Baldwin’s paean to gospel, “The Amen Corner,” a show familiar to Buffalo audiences in local theaters.

All were fascinating.

Not only did these shows bring different audiences to the Shaw, the plays also exposed the regular festival audience to shows they haven’t seen before.

That helps in a different section of Jennings’ portfolio, raising money.

He told the local audience it’s not accurate that various levels of government in Canada are major contributors to the festival till.

Instead, it’s regular ticket buyers: “We currently need to raise around $14 million a year to break even from individuals,” he said. “So that’s a remarkable amount of money. And about 14,000 households donate to us.”

Jennings says that’s about 20% of the households going to Shaw stages.

He told the audience that lets the donors make it clear they are invested in theater, what it does and what it will do.