It sounds like the beginning of an old joke.
Except there’s only one person standing in the lobby.
Which, for a live arts presenter, is either because all four are really the same person—or because we seriously misjudged ticket sales.
Let’s hope it’s the former.
The truth is, anyone who presents live entertainment has to be a little bit of all four. And if we’ve done our job well, when the lights go down and the show begins, the audience never has to think about everything that had to happen to get us to that moment.
But this month, I thought it might be fun to peek behind the curtain.
Let’s say we find an artist we think would be a great fit for the Tri-Cities audience and a show we would like to bring as a presenter. The first question you might expect us to ask is: How much will it cost?
Sometimes an equally important question is: Where is the bus?
Touring artists rarely travel across the country just to play one community. Their schedules are built around a series of interconnected performances, so where they are coming from—and where they need to go next—can determine whether a Tri-Cities date is even possible. An artist appearing in Portland one night and heading east the next day may create an opportunity. The same artist headed in another direction may make the engagement impractical.
So, the routing works. Great. Now, is one of our existing local venues available that night—and can it work for this particular show? While we don’t yet have the purpose-built performing arts center we envision for our community, we do have venue options that we can make work for some performances. The available space needs to accommodate the production, provide a good experience for the audience and have enough seats to make the economics work.
Now it’s time for the accountant.
A touring artist will generally require a guaranteed payment or some other negotiated compensation. But that’s only the beginning. There may also be venue rental, technical labor and equipment, marketing, ticketing, hotels, transportation, hospitality and all the other expenses that come with putting a show onstage.
Many of those costs are committed long before we know how many people will actually buy a ticket.
Based on the costs, ticket prices and number of available seats, the accountant can determine approximately how many tickets we need to sell to make the show work financially. Sell fewer and we may lose money. Sell more and the picture gets considerably brighter. Sell every seat and, assuming we’ve done our homework correctly, everyone gets to feel pretty smart.
The accountant can see the numbers we know.
There’s just one problem. One of the most important numbers doesn’t exist yet.
How many people will actually buy a ticket?
That’s when the fortune teller takes over.
Of course, we’re not really reading tea leaves. We can look at an artist’s history in similar markets, previous ticket sales and other indicators of audience interest. We can look at our own market and draw on experience with similar performances.
But ultimately, we’re trying to predict a decision hundreds of people haven’t made yet: Will they want to see this artist, on this particular night, in this particular venue—and at the ticket price we need them to pay?
So the gambler has to make the call.
Do we book the show?
That’s one of the things that makes presenting live entertainment both exciting and a little unnerving. The right artist on the wrong date doesn’t work. The right artist and date in the wrong venue may not work. And all three can be right, the numbers can look reasonable, and we can still be wrong about the audience.
But when all those pieces do come together, something rather remarkable can happen.
For the audience, it all comes down to one night. The lights dim, the artist walks onstage, and hopefully everything that came before is invisible. For the presenter, that one night may represent months of trying to get all the pieces to line up—and making a few educated guesses along the way.
As ACTF continues exploring opportunities to bring additional professional programming to the Tri-Cities, these are some of the conversations happening behind the scenes. And from time to time, I may use this space to pull back the curtain a little further and share more about a business I’ve been fortunate enough to spend much of my career in.
There are plenty of stories behind that curtain.
