Longer runs and multiple venues are part of the new artistic director's drive to make performances by Tampa Bay's oldest theater company bigger and better-attended.
By JOHN FLEMING
Published September 11, 2003
[Times photo: Cherie Diez]
After a quiet start as American Stage’s artistic director, Todd Olson says changes are in the works this season.
ST. PETERSBURG - When you ask American Stage's new artistic director Todd Olson what he has been doing since arriving at the theater, he answers with one word: "Planning."
And that planning obviously has as much to do with business as it does with art. The plays Olson has scheduled for his first mainstage season are conventional enough, beginning with Friday's opening night performance of Stones in His Pocket, an Irish comedy-drama by Marie Jones. But some of the structural changes he plans could have a radical impact on theater in the Tampa Bay area.
For one thing, American Stage hopes to do longer runs of its mainstage productions. In the past, four-week runs were more or less the rule, with an occasional extension of a few performances for popular shows. This season, however, the theater is going to experiment with longer runs of plays it thinks can find a large audience. For example, arrangements are in place for God's Man in Texas, a hit by David Rambo about Baptist power brokers, to run as long as 12 weeks in two different theaters.
The theater plans to branch out to other venues beyond its 140-seat mainstage space. Next spring, after God's Man in Texas completes its St. Petersburg run, it will transfer to the new theater at Tampa Preparatory School in downtown Tampa. My Way: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra, a revue by Olson and David Grapes, will be staged at St. Petersburg's Palladium Theater next summer.
"I think there are a lot of questions we are trying to solve this year," says Olson, who came to American Stage from Nashville, where he had been associate artistic director and director of education at Tennessee Repertory Theatre. "Can we run things longer than four or five weeks? We hope with God's Man in Texas we can answer that. Maybe the answer is no, but we'll find out."
The rationale behind the changes Olson hopes to implement stem from the pitch he made to the theater's board of trustees before being hired in November. Essentially, he told them that the theater needed to get bigger. The mainstage space, for all its charm, is simply too small to support an ambitious theater company.
"When I interviewed here, I told the board they should imagine the day when this space here is our smaller second stage," he says. "On paper, as I look at a metropolitan area of 2.2-, 2.3-million people, and we're the oldest theater around, why do we have 1,700 subscribers? Why wouldn't we have many more than that?"
Going into its 25th anniversary season, American Stage is indeed the area's longest-running theater, as well as its only truly professional one, with an Equity contract that pays cast and crew something resembling a living wage. But it has drifted as it quickly ran through three artistic directors, all let go by the board.
To be sure, American Stage has had some major successes, including consecutive hits in its largest production of the season, Shakespeare in the Park. Last year's hip-hop The Bomb-itty of Errors went on to play London's West End, no less, and this year's Romeo and Juliet broke attendance and sales records.
But those prominent winners tend to obscure the desultory overall track record of recent mainstage seasons. Even Olson, who went on the payroll in January, has trouble working up much enthusiasm for what he saw last season. His favorite was the Oscar Wilde chestnut The Importance of Being Earnest.
The new artistic director hasn't been credited with anything but sound design for Parallel Lives, the premiere of a play by St. Petersburg Times columnist Bill Maxwell and novelist Beverly Coyle. "It's allowed me to plan without having to produce," he said of the low profile he maintained in his first eight months at the theater.
Incidentally, Olson had a lukewarm response to Parallel Lives, which was inspired by magazine articles and lectures on growing up in segregated Florida by Maxwell and Coyle.
"It's real interesting subject matter, and I enjoyed listening to the stories, but I don't think we quite incubated that right," he says. "I think there's a play there, but a dramatist has to write it. You have to get it out of literary land. Either that or get such a visionary director that the storytelling becomes as interesting as the story itself. I think it was a little pedestrian here. What you ended up with was a whole lot of standing and talking, which is death in the theater."
Olson also has been occupied with getting settled in the area. He and his wife, Charlotte, had their third child in April. They bought a house in Seminole.
Along with longer runs of mainstage productions, Olson is thinking about bringing in "bonus" programming, such as one-man shows on Will Rodgers and Ernie Pyle. In the spring, when the theater is typically dark for two months during rehearsal and performance of Shakespeare in the Park, he wants to use the mainstage for a one-man show by Lee Blessing called Chesapeake.
"It's about a performance artist who draws the ire of a Southern senator," he says. "It's sort of an arts and politics story. There are a lot of twists and turns. We think there's an opportunity to run something that's different enough from what we do in the park that it won't conflict."
As for producing his Sinatra show in the Palladium, Olson is aware of that space's theatrical limitations. The converted church has little wing space or backstage, and the audience seating leaves something to be desired.
"I think certain musicals could work well over there," he says. "I think the Sinatra show, which is basically half theater, half concert, will work very well. We have an audience here that likes more commercial things. So if in the next three years or so we can find a way to move that mandate over to the Palladium and produce a series there, that might be a good thing. It would allow us to become slightly more progressive here at the mainstage, run smaller shows a longer amount of time. We'll find out a lot from the My Way experience whether that's a good partnership or not."
Transferring God's Man in Texas to Tampa Prep will not be the first time American Stage has tried to tap into the Tampa audience. Several times the theater moved its Shakespeare in the Park productions across the bay, with mixed results.
"The problem with that is we took the biggest thing we did, the most difficult thing we did, and we tried to see if there was an audience over there for that," Olson says. "I'd like to go about it just the opposite way. I'd like to take this three-person play, which is a good play and a pretty commercial play, too, and move that over."
Olson had one setback early in his tenure at the theater. In June, he directed an American Stage production of the two-person play Laughing Wild by Christopher Durang at the gay Suncoast Resort. It opened and closed in a night.
"Ultimately, if we do something out there again it has to be a little more from the gay theater genre, it has to be a little campier, it may have to be a musical," he says. "It was very instructive, and I think it was a gamble worth taking. We stopped it before it could do any damage."
If things work out as planned by Olson, American Stage will be busier this season. "The bottom line is this," he says. "Last year, 2002-03, we were basically open for business on the mainstage for about 21 weeks. With the inclusion of Chesapeake we'll make that something like 38 or 39 weeks total. If we hold over My Way and Spinning Into Butter, that puts it up to as much as 46 weeks."
There is risk in the expansion. Olson says the theater is projecting a deficit of as much as $45,000 on its budget of $1.24-million in the fiscal year that closes at the end of September. The budget for this season has risen to $1.4-million.
Olson and Lee Lowry, the theater's managing director, have set a goal of matching last season's total of 1,765 mainstage subscribers. "Coast to coast, with the economy the way it is, theaters are losing subscribers left and right, so we'll jump for joy if we can do that," he says. "If we can hit this 1,765 number again and sort of buck the trend, I think that bodes well for the future." Monday, the theater had reached 94 percent of its goal, with 1,662 subscribers.
Olson is stopping the New Visions series, which was an effort to cultivate new work. "I haven't found it all that new or visionary," he says. "I'll wrestle with how we're going to do original work over the next year. I want whatever the next thing is to be something real, something we can be proud of and not just the scripts that happen to be on my desk."
A cost-saving move by Olson is to cut back on rehearsal time by casting actors who have done the plays before. "We don't have a lot of options when it comes to cutting back productions, but the amount we rehearse is one of the things we can affect," he says. "A week of actors' salaries is no insignificant thing. When it comes to park time, we'll pay $10,000, $12,000 a week just for actors."
As a newcomer to Tampa Bay theater, Olson is prepared to take some flak for his decisions about casting, inevitable when local actors are passed over for out-of-towners. He has leaned on his familiarity with Nashville actors this season, with several given leading roles in Moon for the Misbegotten, Much Ado About Nothing and other plays.
"There's a handful of Nashville actors, first of all, because they're really good actors," he says. "The first people I have to satisfy here are our audiences. The second group I have to satisfy is ourselves, our staff and the playwright and the people directly responsible for the production. Satisfying the artist pool around here is another notch down, but it's one I take very seriously."
