Numbers of Performances

Hello all,

I have not updated this blog since August 9. That is 3 months of no updates! I can’t believe I let this blog become a dead blog. For that I am extremely sorry and hope I can make it up to all of my readers.

So much has happened in that time and I have several posts that I can make about various things that have to do with the management of my little theatre. That has pretty much become my full-time job as I have been unemployed since June of 2009. (I have high hopes for the economy. There HAS to be a job somewhere). Even though there has been no job, there has been plenty for me to do.

In the time period that I have stopped blogging, my theater has closed two shows (one was in performance and a whole show has gone by), opened another (it closes this weekend), changed the number of performances on some shows (extended due to business), Added a full production calendar, shuffled responsibilities of management, added a Staged Reading series, looked at a new space, got involved with better grant application organization, replaced a box office staff person, and I’m sure there is something else I have forgotten. Needless to say, we have been busy.

The thing which is on the forefront of my mind our decision to extend all of our runs. This was actually a reversal of an earlier decision to shorten our runs. A little history:

Traditionally, we would do six main stage shows per year, all with 18 performances. These performance are spread out over five weekends, Thursday – Sunday. This season however, we decided to shorten all of our runs to 14 performances over four weekends. There were several reasons for this. One was that a run of five weeks is harder on the actors and tech people, especially if they are non-paid (as ours our…all volunteer community theater). With a shorter run, you have less royalties to pay and that can add up, especially if you are doing a show by a playwright with high royalties, like Neil Simon. Finally, we were banking on a psychological response to a shorter run which would bring more people as there is a smaller chance to see it.

As we got into the closing weekend of our opening show, we realized that this might not be working for a couple of reasons. First of all, after looking at our box office returns we realized that we weren’t getting the huge jump in attendance we thought we would. There was a small jump, but it could have been by caused by several factors (larger cast size than usual, American classic play) and not enough to make our new goal….which is the second problem.

I may have mentioned in this blog before that while you need to look at your attendance as a whole, you also need to look at what your paid house percentage is. You should have a goal as to what your paid house percentage needs to be in order to keep the operations running. Non-profit theater is difficult because much of it is dependent on grants and donations so with a target paid house percentage, you can at least ballpark know what you have coming the door and then you know what you have to raise. With an 18 performance show, we knew he had to hit a certain percentage. When we subtracted performances, that paid target went up.

Here’s why:

Lets say we have a 100 seat house with 18 performances and need a target of 50% paid house. That is a total of 900 paid seats per show (100 seats x 18 performance = 1800 total seats. 1800 x 50% = 900 paid seats). We decide to take out a weekend and go down to 14 performances. All of a sudden the paid target has to go up to 64.2% paid house. Why? YOU STILL NEED 900 SEATS TO HIT THE TARGET! Just because you are lowering your performances, your target isn’t the same. So you need an additional 13 paid people to come to each show to hit your minimum target. You are now spending more time and effort to add audience, just to get you where you were before. The only way this works is if the same number come to all of your shows and are motivated to get there sooner. That is what we banked on.

When it became evident that this wasn’t working in our favor, I had to call a planning summit to discuss options. Some members of our board of directors didn’t want to change anything because the materials were out, others wanted to open the shows sooner to make sure that the closing nights were the same. Eventually we came up with plan which places two of our shows back to 18 performances (with a third already having 18 performances) and leave three shows at 4 weeks (the one which was about to close, the one which was about to open and our heavy drama of the season).

But wait, what about the extra cost of putting on four additional performances? We looked at that…overhead ended up being almost negligible, which left payroll and royalties. Our average ticket price is about $10/per ticket (That’s not our actual ticket price, but we average that price taking comps into consideration). Our payroll each night comes to about $25 and the royalties each night come to about $75 each night. That means I have an extra cost of about $100 per night (or $400 for the extra weekend). All we had to do to break even on those weekends was to get a total of 40 paid seats over the 4 nights…..which we usually have no problem doing. The decision was made based off of past box office returns to go ahead with the extension because the chance we would lose money was minimal and the chance for extra revenue was huge.

This is the kind of things you need to be thinking about when running a theater company. You have to look at how your revenue stream is doing and then not be afraid to make changes mid-course if necessary. The first show we extended closes this weekend and, by looking at the preliminary box office returns, we at least broke even. All it took was some analyzing of figures and trends.

Advertisement