Baltimore Center Stage has laid off four employees and cut the pay of its remaining staff members in an attempt to trim 5%, or $350,000, from its $7 million operating budget.
The last day of work for some of the laid-off employees will be Jan. 26, while the others will continue working until the fiscal year ends June 30, according to Adam Frank, the theater’s managing director. The remaining 51 workers will take pay cuts of between 1% and 10%. The highest-paid staff members, which includes Frank and the newly appointed artistic director Stevie Walker-Webb, are taking the steepest cuts.
“It’s awful,” Frank acknowledged.
“It is a horrible thing for the people who are losing our jobs, and a horrible thing for us. These are good people who we believe in. But this theater has been around for 60 years, and we want to make sure it survives this moment of financial crisis and is around for another 60 years.”
Nicholas Cohen, executive director of Maryland Citizens for the Arts, likened the news coming out of Center Stage to the “canary in the coal mine.”
Mid-sized groups with seven-figure budgets such as Center Stage are disproportionally being affected by fallout from the pandemic, he said — a development that at least one arts expert predicted four years ago.
“The arts in general are really struggling to emerge from COVID-19,” Cohen said.
“The mid-sized groups don’t have large donor bases and endowments, but they still have mortgages or rents and large staffs. The very small groups have such low overheads they can be nimble,” he said. “But when you’re putting on a theater production and you have to build sets and make costumes and make a lighting design, that’s a heavy lift. It can’t be done by just a few people.”
Center Stage members learned of the layoffs and salary reductions earlier this month. Frank and Walker-Webb pointed out that the cutbacks afflicting Maryland’s largest regional theater in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic are hardly unique to Baltimore. What is most notable about the retrenchment at Center Stage is that it took so long to occur.
Theater troupes nationwide announced a spate of cost-cutting measures last year ranging from Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Company, which laid off staff and curtailed new productions to the San Francisco Bay area’s Cal Shakes, which temporarily stopped mounting its own shows.
“Anyone leading an arts institution in America right now has collectively signed up to do what needs to be done to make sure our arts institutions survive,” Walker-Webb said. “What is at stake here is the heart and soul of our country. If these institutions crumble, that is what we will lose.”
One of the primary culprits, Frank said, is the rapid demise of the subscription model. Theater troupes were founded on a business plan of collecting money upfront in the form of season ticket sales, and using the proceeds over the year to build sets, make costumes and pay actors.
But the subscription model — and its critical advance cash flow — has been in decline for two decades, as entertainment options proliferated and more patrons opted to purchase tickets to individual shows at the last minute, Frank said. The pandemic, which drove home the futility of advance planning, exacerbated that change.
In addition to struggling with subscriptions, arts groups nationwide have reported declining audience numbers overall.
“This is a particularly precarious moment for the arts,” said Steven Skerritt-Davis, executive director of the Maryland State Arts Council. “There still is a hesitation to gather in public spaces and to be part of large groups of people. That still lingers.”
And, Skerritt-Davis added, “theaters in particular in the state are struggling.”
Ironically, Frank said that ticket sales at Center Stage have been strong this year. The first show of the season, “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” was so popular the run was extended by one more week, while ArtsCentric’s holiday production of “Cinderella” (which was mounted at Center Stage) sold out.
Tickets for the remaining three shows of the 2023-24 season: “Mexodus”, “Hot Wing King” and “The Importance of Being Earnest” are selling well, he said.
But, he acknowledged that there are fewer bodies in Center Stage’s seats this season than there were five years ago.
“In our economy, ticket sales haven’t supported the full cost of productions since the invention of TV and radio,” Frank said. Making matters worse, charitable giving and contributions also have declined since the pandemic, though Frank was unable to immediately provide statistics.
Cohen described Baltimore Center Stage as “one of the most well-managed arts organizations in the state and added:
“That’s almost what worries me the most. When you go to see a show, the theater is full. People are still going to their shows. And they’re still having financial problems.”
In addition to changing audience habits, the inflation hit mid-sized troupes hard.
“We had a couple of years where relief aid helped us float through the incredible deficits caused by COVID,” Cohen said.
“But just as the relief money began to dry up, inflation hit. In my organization, it’s 30% more expensive than it was before the pandemic. Our expenses are from 2024, but we’re still operating on budgets from 2019.”
Walker-Webb said that this announcement aside, he truly believes Center Stage’s fortunes are on the upswing.
“A turnaround is happening,” he said. “I can see the excitement building about the work we’re doing now and the work we will be doing in the future. This is a moment of great difficulty. We just have to get through it so we can reap the benefits that are about to come.”
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