What Regional Theatre Can Learn From The Newspaper Industry
Greg Ehrhardt, OnStage Blog Editorial Staff
This was originally published in the OnStage Blog newsletter on September 15th, 2023. If you want to be the first to receive these exclusive commentaries and all newly published stories in your inbox, subscribe here.
The United States, by and large, has returned to normal since the pandemic. The economy is, by most measures, doing well, unemployment remains low, and entertainment industries that were hit the hardest by the pandemic have mostly returned to 2019 levels.
Well, almost all entertainment industries.
Theatre, especially suburban theatre, has still not recovered from losing its audience during the pandemic. Audiences are still, in 2023, down between 25-30% on average for theatres across the country. One theatre near where I live, Downtown Cabaret Theatre in Bridgeport, has made Connecticut news by publicly announcing they will probably have to close down soon unless they somehow come up with $500,000 in the next several months.
Downtown Cabaret Theatre has a deep history within its Bridgeport community; among other achievements, it was the home of the national debut of Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in 1979. And now, in 2023, it might close its doors forever.
Audiences wanting spectacle from entertainment when they go out in a post-pandemic world is an often talked about the reason for this trend, and I don’t dispute this, especially in a suburban setting, but I keep coming back to the decision announced by Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the country, to hire full-time reporters to cover anything and everything related to Taylor Swift and Beyonce as a lesson regional theatres could benefit from.
Newspapers have been suffering from declining subscriptions, page views, and increasing paper costs for two decades now; while their challenges are unique, they also share pain with the regional theatre industry in trying to keep up with rapidly changing audiences' appetites for their product.
So I was amused by the social media reaction from national media reporters slamming the decision by USA Today, saying, among other things, that USA Today is selling out and not engaging in actual journalism to try and pay the bills.
To this, has anyone not noticed how business has worked over the last 70 years?
Newspapers relied on the sports and classified section for their subscribers for most of the 20th century. Sure, they had the privilege of being the only place to get news for a long time, but let’s not be overly nostalgic; people weren’t subscribing to local newspapers to satiate their appetite for hard news coverage. They used newspapers for far more mundane purposes, which subsidized the news coverage that democracy needs to hold people in business and government accountable.
I still have questions about the business model of Gannett hiring full-time Taylor Swift and Beyonce reporters. Are people going to come to USA Today for their news of two of the biggest global celebrities, for starters?
But, Gannett is thinking about solving their problems correctly: getting new customers to check out their product and subsidizing the meat and potatoes of what they feel is their business purpose of hard news coverage.
Regional theatres need to go through the same exercise. How can theatres use their space to attract customers who have never visited? I’ll be plain; it might be for completely non-theatre reasons, and that’s ok! It’s normal for businesses to sell products not for their core audience that sell well to the general population to help fund their business operations.
Downtown Cabaret is on a public PR campaign to attract audiences to their current show, which could save their theatre. Their production is Guys and Dolls, which is still one of the country's most-performed high school productions.
I’m sorry, that wouldn’t cut it in 2015, never mind 2023.
If regional theatres can’t, or won’t, use their theatre in unconventional ways, they can at least look at what Leavenworth Summer Theatre did to make their annual production of Sound of Music a tourist attraction.
We need regional theatres to survive, but we also need them to adapt to modern times. I’m not sure they understand that they must adapt to survive.