California’s Devastated Live Theater Industry Hopes for a Bailout: ‘We’re All Dying’

Before COVID, Los Angeles’ Open Fist Theatre Company typically produced four or five major shows a year, with sold-out crowds for its musicals. It broke even or made a tiny profit most years.

This year, the nonprofit company is losing about $20,000 a month, a considerable sum on a $250,000 annual budget, said Martha Demson, Open Fist’s producing artistic director who runs the company in residence at Atwater Village Theatre. It’s down to two major productions, selling a little more than half the available seats for its now-running sci-fi fantasy musical “Starmites.”

More than three years after the pandemic’s onset, many live performing arts venues and nonprofit arts organizations throughout California are struggling to stay open, scaling back performances and even shutting down — and it’s not just because of COVID’s devastating toll, said Demson, who’s board president of Theatre Producers of Southern California, a regional trade association.

While small and mid-sized performance venues have been the hardest hit, large organizations that get the bulk of shrinking philanthropic dollars are hurting, too.

Also Read:
A24 Buys New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre for $10 Million

Center Theatre Group, one of the largest theater groups in the country, announced earlier this month that it was “taking the extraordinary step” of pausing season programming at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum starting in July through the 2023-2024 season and restructuring the organization, citing “a crisis unlike any other in our 56-year history.”

The plight of small theater groups could resonate more broadly throughout the entertainment industry down the line. Their stages incubate actors and train production crews who go on to work in film and TV, as well as providing fodder for stage-to-film adaptations.

“These smaller producers all over the state really are an important part of the pipeline,” Demson said. “If it goes away, then the emerging artists who get their beginning professional opportunities in these organizations will have a greatly decreased access to the [film and television] industry.”

Demson said that her Los Angeles theater company will be “completely out of money” in a few months without funding.

Also Read:
Proposed California Budget Extends Hollywood Tax Credits Through 2030

“You can’t spend 100% of your time just trying to raise funds but that’s what I have been doing to try to keep my company afloat,” she said.

The rising costs of rent and production, the impact of recent state laws regulating gig work, inadequate state arts funding and diminishing pandemic relief funds have led to this season of unprecedented uncertainty.

“The general consensus is that we’re all dying,” Demson said. “No hyperbole.”

As California finalizes its state budget, advocates are hoping for millions of dollars to help keep the live performing arts sector — which also includes music, dance, magic shows and circus acts — afloat.

For years, California has lagged many other states in per capita arts funding. It’s currently estimated to rank 15th behind Florida and Utah in funds that flow from state agencies. Organizations have had to be “scrappy” in that environment, said Brandon Lorenz, public policy director of the Actors’ Equity Association, a labor union representing those who work in live theatrical performance. This longtime underinvestment and the COVID pandemic created a “double hit” to the live arts sector, he says.

“At the end of the day, the No. 1 challenge we’re dealing with is a lack of funding,” Lorenz said.

Among the longstanding theater venues that have recently announced their closing are the Groves Cabin Theatre in the Inland Empire’s Morongo Valley, the Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theater in Claremont, the Sacred Fools Theatre Company and the Complex Theatre in Los Angeles, the Bay Area Children’s Theatre in Berkeley, the Tabard Theatre in San Jose, and PianoFight in San Francisco and Oakland. More than a half dozen theaters have reportedly closed in Los Angeles’ North Hollywood neighborhood alone.

Some venues, such as Contra Costa Musical Theater that’s operated for more than five decades, have radically scaled back their productions. Other organizations, such as Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse, have shed staff.

Before the pandemic, employment in the state’s live performing arts sector experienced “tremendous growth,” increasing 43% between 2001 and 2019 and growing twice as fast as that of the economy overall, according to a recent CVL Economics study. But it lost a decade’s worth of job growth in the pandemic, with employment dropping back to its 2010 level of roughly 259,000 jobs by 2021.

Even at that level, the nonprofit performing arts sector contributes $6.2 billion a year in the state, according to the CVL study.

Also Read:
The ‘Leave It to Beaver’ Street Is Looking More Like Today’s LA

Meanwhile, state and local governments lost nearly $1 billion in tax revenue in 2021 because of the pandemic’s economic toll on the sector and could lose a combined $4.1 billion between 2020 and 2023 if the trend continues, according to the study commissioned by the Actors’ Equity Association, the Theatre Producers of Southern California, and Arts for LA.

The shrinking sector doesn’t only mean lost jobs. It’s also about the loss of economic activity because when people go see a musical, symphony or play, they generally spend money at the restaurants next door, to park their car and to hire a babysitter, Demson and Lorenz said. Moreover, these venues also rely on services and products from local businesses ranging from printers and lumber yards to dry cleaners, which also keeps money circulating.

Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senator Anthony Portantino’s SB1116, which created the Equitable Payroll Fund, a grant program to support small nonprofit arts organizations and workers directly after the crushing pandemic and the enactment of AB5, which extended employee status to some gig workers but also created a financial burden on small community nonprofit theaters who relied on independent contractors, Portantino said.

Portantino’s bill, sponsored by Arts Equity and the Theater Producers of Southern California, aims to offset certain payroll costs by helping hire and keep employees of such organizations but it has yet to be funded.

Also Read:
Streaming Could Help Broadway Bounce Back – but There Are Obstacles in the Great White Way

The senator initially asked for $50 million to fund the bill but recently revised his request in light of the state’s substantial budget deficit, asking for unexpended funds of up to $12 million in a nonprofit performing arts grant program to help about 300 theaters.

“I get calls almost every other week from a small nonprofit theater that’s struggling, saying, ‘What’s happening with the bill? I don’t know if I can last two more months,” Portantino said. “And as you know, once we close the small theaters, it’s very hard to reopen them.”

Portantino said he doesn’t believe anyone is opposed to keeping community theaters open, but the question is “can we make it a priority before it’s too late?”

It’s unclear whether lawmakers will fund the bill in the next state budget, which must be approved by June 30, when the state’s fiscal year ends. A spokesperson for Newsom’s office declined to comment.

Considering all the performing arts venues that have already closed, “without some intervention, we’re looking to see the contraction of the sector beyond recognition,” Demson said. “That’s the risk.”

Those closures are creating cultural voids in some areas of the state. The Groves Cabin Theatre, which opened in San Bernardino County’s Morongo Valley in the 1980s, is a 22-seat, mountainside theater that is so intimate the audience felt like they were “intruding upon someone’s experience,” said Abe Daniels, the theater’s artistic director.

But the venue stayed unoccupied during most of the pandemic because it was impossible to socially distance during performances, he said. Then the award-winning theater, once the home of owners Joy and Bill Groves, needed significant repairs.

Joy Groves, today a widow in her 80s, announced in April that she was closing the all-volunteer theater for good. That effectively leaves only one brick-and-mortar theater in the area, Theatre 29 in Twentynine Palms, which primarily does musicals and is a 45-minute drive from the Groves, Daniels said.

“We were the only theater up here that did straight plays and a lot of classics,” he said. “It’s sad because now we have nothing up here.”

Also Read:
The Unscripted Tonys Were a Win for CBS and Broadway | Analysis