At the Lyric Theater’s creative space in South Burlington, rehearsals for Ivy and Bean are underway. The company plans to perform the musical outside the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington, the Dorothy Alling Memorial Library in Williston and the Shelburne Museum in August.
“How this season is going is yet to be determined,” said Erin Evarts, the company’s executive director, but she said the past season closed “with a bang” with performances of Matilda at Burlington’s Flynn Theater this past spring.
“We were thrilled to present one of our mainstage shows again for the first time in two years,” Evarts said. “It was thrilling to have so many people in the audience for Matilda. We had people who purchased tickets before the pandemic. It was postponed for two years. But then we had a huge influx of tickets (bought) in the last couple of weeks.”
Evarts said the theater company’s audience expanded during the pandemic because it pivoted quickly to provide outdoor and virtual performances.
Lyric Theater does not have subscribers, and appears to be thriving without them.
For two companies that do rely on subscriptions, this year is proving to be hard.
Vermont Stage, in Burlington, is in rehearsals for its annual fundraising play. This year, the company is performing God of Carnage at Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center, in Burlington, from July 20 to 24.
“It has been tough,” said Cristina Alicea, the company’s artistic director. Alicea said the company is still only getting audiences half as big as before the pandemic, and so is only receiving half the income it used to bring in from individual sales and subscriptions.
“It has been a bit challenging because there’s still some hesitancy from folks to come,” Alicea said.
Alicea said the company has been compensating for lost ticket sales and subscriptions with donations, a federal shuttered venues operating grant and another grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. It also received a $10,000 Vermont Cultural Recovery Grant last year.
“We’ve received government help and that is what has kept us alive,” Alicea said.
But that aid has run out, she continued, and audiences are not in the habit of going to the theater anymore.
“It’s been two years since people have been out doing things, and I think there’s going to be a lot of people that need to rebuild their habit of going out,” Alicea said. “We’re definitely going to need to see them back within the next two seasons or we’re going to have to rethink if we’re viable. It’s definitely pretty scary.”
Northern Stage, in White River Junction, is also feeling pressure, but more for artistic than financial reasons.
The company is in rehearsals for its summer student musical intensive, an audition-based program for students aged 12 to 18. This year, students are rehearsing Urinetown, which they will perform starting July 28 in the company’s indoor Byrne Theater.
The play is not part of the regular season, which relies on subscribers.
“What’s been most difficult for us is regaining subscribers,” said Ryan Klink, the company’s director of sales and marketing. “I think people are hesitant to book in advance and are hesitant to commit to a full six-show season.”
Subscribers allow the company to take artistic risks, Klink said, producing plays that may not necessarily have commercial appeal.
This season, for example, the company just finished putting on Side by Side by Sondheim and starting this fall, it will put on Shook, its first musical commission. It has four other plays scheduled through July 2023.
“If you’re not going after subscribers, you have a tendency to program for a single-ticket audience, which can be a little bit more commercially driven,” Klink said.
He said subscriptions were down by half last year from the 2019-2020 season, and have not recovered this year, but single-ticket sales made up for the fall in subscriptions.
“The audience is still there,” Klink said. “They’re just buying single tickets only, and they’re buying them at the last minute, which for a marketer, sends me into panic attacks.”
Klink attributes the success of single-ticket sales in part to the construction of a new outdoor theater, which allowed the company to offer programs in the summer, something it had not usually done before. As a result, he said, 22% of the audience was new last year.
Another company is proving that getting subscribers back is possible.
The 86-year-old Weston Theater Company is performing the first show of its subscription season, Stephen Sondheim’s Marry Me a Little, through July 30 at Walker Farm in Weston.
Weston Theater has not only been successful in getting subscribers back, said Andy Butterfield, the company’s director of marketing and communications, but subscriptions this year have actually exceeded the all-time record set in 2018 by 52%.
Butterfield said the company did this by letting subscribers choose between one of three prices. The first covers the cost of an actual ticket for the season, meaning that if the theater was full, that is how much each seat would have to bring in for the company to break even. The second is to pay the regular subscription price they were used to paying. And the third option is to pay what they want.
Butterfield recognizes that not all theater companies can follow this model. He said Weston Theater has been developing this choose-your-subscription model for the last four years at smaller events — such as its music series at Walker Farm, in Weston, and some speaker series — before rolling it out this year for its big productions.
And Butterfield said that while subscriptions are soaring, general audience numbers tell a different story.
The company saw a record single day on its first day of single ticket sales this year, May 23, Butterfield said, exceeding the previous record set last year by 21%.
“So we felt like we’d been shot out of a cannon,” he said.
The landing, though, was rough.
“Since then, it’s been a slow drip of new sales,” Butterfield said. He said individual ticket sales are lagging behind what they were before the pandemic. He attributes those weak sales to tourists not returning to watch plays. Pre-pandemic, he said, 45% to 50% of all single ticket sales were to out-of-state buyers. This year, out-of-state buyers account for only 25% of ticket sales, Butterfield said.
“We chalk that up to gas prices (and declining) investment markets,” he said. “We hope to see those out-of-state ticket buyers come back, because it is really hurting us right now.”
To boot, 10% of patrons the company has surveyed report that they are not ready to come back to the theater because of COVID concerns and will not be ready until September or after. Another 6% of patrons surveyed, he said, are not ready to come back at all as long as the company continues to require patrons to wear masks.
“If we had a performer fall ill with COVID, it would shut us down for a period long enough that it would do significant financial damage,” Butterfield said, explaining the importance of requiring masks.
It’s just one example of how precarious the situation is for some Vermont theaters.
“I hope that people get that if they like the thing that they see on all our stages, they need to come back to it,” said Alicea of Vermont Stage.