When word came that Little Rock's Robinson Center Music Hall would close for more than two years during renovation and reconstruction, it presented a quandary for the three central Arkansas performing arts organizations that use the hall for some or all of their performances.
The Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, Celebrity Attractions and Ballet Arkansas were all going to have to find a new venue for at least two seasons. And because there is no other facility anywhere near that size in the state, they were going to have to sacrifice seating and consequently ticket sales.
The solution for all three turned out to be the Maumelle Performing Arts Center, which opened in 2011 as part of the new Maumelle High School campus.
It seats just over 1,200 -- Arkansas Symphony Executive Director Christina Littlejohn says 1,204; Maumelle High School's facility manager, Bob Birdsong, says that if you include all the spaces deliberately left vacant for wheelchairs or extra chairs, you can fit 1,220 "safely and legally."
That's almost exactly half of the seats in the "old" Robinson. It will seat closer to 1,800 when it's finished in November 2016, with an expanded lobby and a stage that will have moved forward and lowered into what previously was the convention center exhibit hall.
At roughly the halfway point of the 2014-15 season, the symphony has put on four pairs of Masterworks concerts on the performing arts center stage. Celebrity Attractions has brought in three touring shows and Ballet Arkansas has staged its annual December performance of Peter Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker.
They've all been adjusting as they've gone along, and so have the folks who run the center. "It's a learning process," says Birdsong,
who also teaches drama and stagecraft at
Maumelle High School.
"Everybody's been very easy to work with because they knew [coming in] it would be kind of different," he says. "We're a high school, so there are going to be a lot of variables, like unescorted adults before 5 o'clock -- that's not allowed, and people have had to get used to that. We have to protect our charges first and foremost. So when the orchestra arrives, I try to make sure the children have left the building."
'WONDERFUL SPACE'
The center's acoustics are a vast improvement over what the Arkansas Symphony has been working with (and against) at Robinson. The sound quality that had been state-of-the-art at the time of its 1939 construction deteriorated after a remodeling in the early '70s converted it from a theater and concert hall to a "civic auditorium." Attempts to bring the hall back closer to its original acoustic shape in 1999-2000 that included removing the tiles and putting hardwood panels on rear walls, helped some, but didn't help the chronically poor acoustics on the stage.
"It's a wonderful performance space," says Littlejohn of the Maumelle facility, which has hosted eight Masterworks concerts and a "side-by-side" concert with its youth orchestras since the end of September. "Orchestra members and [Music Director Philip Mann] are really enjoying it; they can hear each other play.
"The people that are coming to the concerts are universally enjoying the artistic experience. Every single performance, there are more audience members saying, 'I didn't think it could get any better, but then it got better.' It's such an intimate space that you can hear and see the orchestra as well."
The orchestra also has gone as close to all out to make it as easy as possible for patrons to find the facility, park when they get there and get to the right door once they're parked. That has included putting maps (and a list of nearby restaurants) in the season-ticket packets, posting directional signs along roadways, having staff and volunteers in golf carts to move concertgoers from the remoter parking lots to the auditorium entrance and even running shuttles from Little Rock to Maumelle for patrons who would rather not make the drive. (It's about a 30-mile round-trip from downtown Little Rock to Maumelle High.) They tried to match season subscribers with seats as close to the ones they had at Robinson and before the season started held a "meet your seat" open house to acquaint them with the location in the new hall.
The orchestra has been selling 1,202 seats for each Saturday evening and Sunday matinee Masterworks concert. Littlejohn says they've been filling, on average, 90-92 percent of total capacity "between the four weekends." Opening weekend figures: 1,073 for Saturday, 1,043 for Sunday. For the most recent pair, Jan. 31-Feb. 1: 1,142 Saturday, 1,056 for Sunday.
That still doesn't come close to making up for the revenue loss the orchestra is experiencing, but budgetwise, "we did make plans," Littlejohn says. "We planned for a drop of 25 percent in attendance, and that's what we're seeing. We'd hoped for better than that, but that's what we planned for."
ROOM TO MANEUVER
One issue the orchestra hasn't had to face is a shortage of dressing room space; room for one guest star and one conductor didn't cause much of a hassle for them or for the facility.
"The symphony was fairly simple, because I do basically the same thing for our bands here," Birdsong says. "All we had to do was dress up a little bit.
"The [Little Rock] Convention & Visitors Bureau graciously gave us all of the risers they normally use for the symphony at Robinson, and after many meetings with Philip [Mann] and [personnel and operations manager] David Renfro, and many tries, we finally got a formula they liked."
Littlejohn adds, "They've done a great job of making us feel at home."
Dressing room space, however, was among the major challenges Birdsong had to deal with for Ballet Arkansas and its nearly 200-member Nutcracker cast.
"Robinson is a structured theater, with all the backstage dressing room support," explains Ballet Arkansas Executive Director Karen Bassett. "At Maumelle we were using classrooms and creating makeshift dressing rooms. And there was a functioning school while we had people coming in and out."
Birdsong says, "The Nutcracker just took up residence for an entire week. I'm glad they did; my kids learned a lot. My kids got to crew it, along with the IATSE crew," members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 204. The students also got paid, $7.50 an hour. But Birdsong had to give up his own classroom to provide dressing space for the first-act party parents.
Bassett says that, compared to Robinson, "the wings were smaller; there wasn't as much room to maneuver." And the intercom system between the stage and backstage only has a single channel, and that was being used to pipe the music backstage so dancers would know what was happening onstage.
Erin Anson, Ballet Arkansas' production, company and stage manager, says the differences between stages weren't an issue for the members of the ballet's professional company, who perform in all kinds of conditions as they tour across the state.
"The pros were not fazed by the space, as they are used to performing in difficult spaces," she says. "Not to say this space was difficult, but the length of the battens [the pipes on which stage backdrops and curtains hang] in combination with the small wing size and amount of set pieces and props we had to house in the wings, definitely made entrances and exits a bit of a ballet of their own while drops were transitioning."
However, "the [orchestra] pit was terrifying. I had asked the facility if they had a protective net when we toured it in 2013, and they seemed to be confused as to why I would consider that an item of interest. But when we got that fog pumping [at the top of Act II] and those 6-year-old little angels started walking downstage, every person in the wings was watching to make sure they didn't go past the first wing."
Ballet Arkansas added a Saturday matinee to its Nutcracker schedule to accommodate the demand for tickets, and, Bassett says, "As far as public ticket sales go, we did sell a couple hundred more tickets altogether" and gave away fewer complimentary admissions.
"Last year we sold around 4,000 tickets to all the public shows downtown, and we always comp about 400 more -- that's for the dancers, production staff, family, larger sponsors, things like that. This year we actually sold 4,075, and we had four shows instead of three to do that, and we comped about 300 tickets."
They also made a little more money per ticket, because the Maumelle facility has no unobstructed seats, so "we had fewer lower-priced seats," she adds. Audience response, she says, was almost universally positive.
Where Ballet Arkansas lost money was on the two weekday shows for area schools. With only half the available seats, even though both shows essentially sold out, "we lost about $17,500 in revenue," Bassett says. "We knew that was going to happen. And with our production schedule, all the rehearsals and cast, there was no way we could add more school shows."
Nor is it likely to happen next year. "I'm just not sure how we would do it," she says. "We're already running the cast ragged that whole production week."
TRAILBLAZING SHOWS
Anson says she learned a good deal about how the space was going to work out because Celebrity Attractions had already partially blazed a trail for her.
The presenter deliberately scheduled two smaller productions at the beginning of the season, says Celebrity Attractions Chief Executive Officer Ed Payton: "The first two shows, on purpose, were not national Broadway touring shows. We didn't want to bring in three or four trucks and a cast of 50 right away. We needed time to learn the facility: 'Where do we put the company manager's office? How about ironing boards? Quick changes offstage?' They had no experience with that here."
The Tulsa-based presenter got its feet wet with Music Man in Concert, which required no sets and very little technical support. "Music Man in Concert actually used my gear, our decks, everything; they just showed up with costumes and actors and actresses," Birdsong says.
"We had a little bit of a hitch because our dressing rooms were small, and [star] Shirley Jones required a separate dressing room, so they got her a Winnebago, like a star trailer [on a movie set]."
Part of the learning curve for Birdsong included "the housekeeping that is done at Robinson -- our school had to catch up to that, but we finally have a method down," he says. "There are so many variables, like laundry. We have a family and consumer science classroom that has one washer and one dryer and that's it. When a show of any size comes in and has to do laundry, sometimes we have to farm that out."
The second show was to have been Love Letters, a two-person show that also didn't have many extraordinary technical demands. But when the production company yanked the rights, they ended up bringing in Broadway With a Twist, a dance-based variety show, at the last minute. That presented a number of technical issues involving lighting, sound and even video. Communication with the other arts groups moving into the facility paid off: they rented the marley floor Ballet Arkansas had used for The Nutcracker for Broadway With a Twist.
Payton says Celebrity Attractions geared up for the new venue by inserting information in season-subscriber packets, including a map and a layout of the campus; sent email blasts to patrons; and made the same information available on the Celebrity Attractions site for nonsubscribers. They also held a "meet your seat" open house.
They did run into some logistical issues -- for example, they had to adjust the usual 7:30 p.m. curtain time to 8 p.m. on the opening Friday night of Music Man in Concert to avoid parking-lot chaos because the high school had a home football game the same evening.
The biggest challenge for Celebrity Attractions and for Birdsong's facility arrived last week with the national touring production of Lerner & Loewe's musical Camelot, which closed on Sunday (and has headed for Fayetteville's Walton Arts Center).
"I've done load-ins at Robinson that were 20 trucks," Birdsong says. "This is just three 35-foot semitrailers and a tour bus, but it's still the biggest thing we've ever done here."
Payton says the Camelot load-in went very smoothly. And while it's hard to gauge from just the first two shows (Camelot figures weren't available by deadline), but ticket sales have pretty much hit according to projections. "Expectations were that we'd do 50-60 percent of the audience the first season, and we're there," he says, adding total seats for a Friday-Sunday, four-show run total 4,300-4,500. "Right now we've hit about 2,000 for both four-show performances. We're not where we want to be, but we're where we expected to be."
AFTER THE BALL
Once Robinson reopens, there's still a pretty good chance Celebrity Attractions will continue to mount some shows in Maumelle, "shows that make sense there," Payton says. It gives him a backup he hasn't had before, a place to put shows that might be too small for Robinson, but that he might already have booked into the theater in, say Lubbock, Texas, which seats 1,400.
Littlejohn says the symphony might also maintain a link to the Maumelle facility.
"There is some talk. We're working on our planning, and one of our goals is creating a web of musical activity throughout central Arkansas. If we did have enough demand, we would like to maintain a presence out there. And we have noticed an increase in ticket buyers from Maumelle."
Ballet Arkansas, which has always had a challenge finding performance space, will also keep the Maumelle center on the radar for spring and fall performances. Their spring concerts, for example, have recently been at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre, which, Basset says, has been "gracious enough to let us use their space, but they don't carve out a week for us. Every year we wait to see if that will happen."
Style on 02/17/2015