How Cinnabar and other Sonoma County theaters are surviving in a post-COVID world

In January, Santa Rosa Junior College suspended its Summer Repertory theater program, a local favorite with theatergoers since 1972. The junior college has been struggling with multimillion dollar deficits largely driven by declining student enrollment, a statewide trend.

A month later, Main Stage West in Sebastopol announced its final curtain call after 12 years. Like other independent local live theater companies, it fell victim to economic challenges that started with the pandemic and continued with controversial legislation that in some cases doubled the amount performing arts companies must pay their talent and staff.

Other programs are struggling. Transcendence Theatre Company, which started presenting its shows in Jack London State Historic Park 12 years ago, reports its revenues dipped 35-40% following the pandemic, and due to the aforementioned legislation, Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park saw many former independent contractors put on staff, almost doubling the production payroll in some cases.

Despite the losses, local theater leaders insist that live theater is not dead. But to survive it must adapt not only to new economic realities, but also to the changing nature of audiences, in terms of both demographics and diversity.

Economic realities

After the coronavirus shut down large public gatherings in March 2020, live theater companies were unable to present much more than online or outdoor productions, if that.

“Theater took a horrible hit during the pandemic worldwide, and that continues to be difficult. I think we’re building back,” said Leslie McCauley, outgoing chairwoman and artistic director in Santa Rosa Junior College’s department of theater and fashion.

The downward attendance trend isn’t limited to local companies. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that “Fewer than half as many people saw a Broadway show during the season that recently ended than did so during the last full season before the coronavirus pandemic. Many regional theaters say ticket sales are down significantly.”

“I think that because of the pandemic, there were people who never came back because of their own health problems, or they don’t want to be with that many other people, ” said James Newman, who has directed the college summer theater program since 2006 and will succeed McCauley as theater department chairman next school year.

“Post-pandemic lag still persists among the older demographics,” said Diane Dragone, executive director at the Cinnabar Theater in Petaluma. “There is a continued fear of crowded spaces within this group. I don’t know if some of these people will ever come back.”

Dragone recently announced her company, now marking its 50th season, will move to a new venue somewhere in Petaluma next year, but Jan Klebe, owner of the original Cinnabar site, still hopes to host performances there.

At 6th Street Playhouse, in Santa Rosa, the management reports that the theater’s two performance spaces are running at 75-85% of their seating capacity. Other theaters have been harder hit, and are sometimes half-full at best.

“I think we all assumed the audience would come back after the pandemic,” said Beth Craven, producing director at the Mendocino Theatre Company. Her long resume includes previous leadership positions at the 6th Street Playhouse and Main Stage West. “There’s a lot going on now and who knows how it’s going to shake out?”

Not only did the pandemic lead to fewer and smaller audiences, it also affected the casts and crews of theater productions, forcing companies to cancel performances more often than in the past. The classic motto “The show must go on” was compromised.

“We lost a lot of money due to sickness,” said Sheri Lee Miller, artistic director and manager at Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park. “It used to be that if you weren’t bleeding profusely or had bones sticking out, you went on stage. Actors ran offstage, threw up and went back out. After the pandemic, we’re not comfortable with that.”

Legacy of labor legislation

Theater leaders also noted the effects of California state law AB5, which took effect Jan. 1, 2020, and required companies that hired independent contractors to reclassify them as employees, imposing minimum wage requirements and increasing payroll costs.

“Our payroll costs have been double what they have been in the past,” said Anne Clark, managing director of Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse. “We have to bring in close to $1 million in donations just to cover our expenses.”

Brad Surosky of Transcendence Theater Company also noted the double whammy.

“At about the same time the pandemic hit, AB5 hit,” he said. “It’s a humongous change in our budget. We have close to 300 employees.”

Bucking the trend

It’s not all doom and gloom in the theater community, however, and some are hoping a little innovation goes a long way.

At The California, a new theater space that opened in downtown Santa Rosa last September, CEO Argo Thompson (he defines his title as Chief Eternal Optimist) has been emphasizing variety, with comedy and music nights as well as theater productions. Food is delivered from nearby restaurants.

Diversity is encouraged, too, with productions like the solo play “Seeking the Last Gay Man,” performed in Spanish with English subtitles.

Thompson’s resident drama company, Left Edge, opened the venue with a production of “Fun Home,” a musical based on the graphic memoir by the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, tracking her youth and her quest to define her own sexual identity.

“We’re seeing a more diverse audience — socially, economically, racially and demographically,” said Thompson, whose lifelong love of the theater arts began when he was a student at Santa Rosa’s Piner High School.

Trying new things

“We all need to take a hard look at the shows we’re producing,” said Jaime Love, executive artistic director at Sonoma Arts Live, which stages productions at the Sonoma Community Center.

“We just hired somebody to do social media for us, to give us a better profile,” she said. “We need to reach a more diverse audience.”

To that end, Love’s company produced “Ain’t Misbehavin,” a tribute to Black jazz pianist and songwriter Fats Waller, last fall. At Spreckels, a one-night presentation in February of “Juke Joint Jukebox” — a cabaret-style celebration of Black musical history ‒ sold out early and required additional seating to meet demand.

This month, 6th Street Playhouse opened a new production of the rarely staged “A Raisin in the Sun,” the first play by a Black woman playwright to be produced on Broadway, back in 1959. The show sold out its first weekend in the theater’s smaller, 99-seat Monroe Stage space and the run was extended.

Jared Sakren, artistic director at 6th Street, said he chose that play rather than a lesser-known work because it is not only a moving saga about a Black family but also an American theater classic in its own right.

“You can diversify your audience,” he explained. “But it’s tricky to build a new audience without losing your core audience.”

Steven David Martin, artistic director of the Raven Players in Healdsburg, urges more experiments with interactive theater productions.

“Making the production a true inclusive event means doing everything in our power to make the audience an integral part of the experience,” he said. “The downfall of a lot of live theater is a ‘presentational’ approach, which reinforces the separation of actor and audience.”

Bring in the kids

Theaters also aim for more diverse audiences in terms of age.

“Under the umbrella of The California, we have two theater companies: Left Edge and the Young Actors Studio,” Thompson said.

Clark, now at 6th Street, previously served as education director of the Bay Area Children’s Theatre. This season she has initiated a program of live shows in Santa Rosa aimed at young audiences, which began with a successful series of Saturday matinee performances of “A Year with Frog and Toad.” The theater also offers studio classes.

Other local companies have their own programs, notably Cinnabar Theater’s Young Rep program in Petaluma. Local theater programs for children include Bridget Palmer’s A Theater for Children, which presents shows at the Steele Lane Community Center in Santa Rosa.

“The job for arts leaders currently is to create new audiences — the future generation of theatergoers,” said Dragone at Cinnabar. “The challenge for all of us is how we are going to do that and not lose the current audiences we have. This is a fine line in our programming decisions.”

Must the show go on?

So is it curtains for live local theater? Its advocates say no, not as long as performers continue to go onstage.

“Passion is what has kept theater going for 3,000 years,” said Craven in Mendocino.

One curtain falls, and another rises.

“We closed Main Stage West on a Sunday,” said Keith Baker, the company’s former producing artistic director, “and on Monday, I started directing a new production of Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ for ArtQuest at Santa Rosa High School.”

Baker’s not quitting, but he predicts it will take change to save the art form.

“Ticket sales are never going to cover the costs,” he said. “When some angel steps forward with a major donation, that’s when your program expands and your theater grows. We need people to go beyond buying tickets and even beyond donations, and serve on the board of a nonprofit theater.”

The main thing that theaters can do is to continue doing what they do best.

“If live theater can stick to its strengths, nothing else can replace it,” said Sakren of 6th Street. “Theater is the ultimate 3D experience. It’s provoking you to think and it can be fun, too.”

So don’t get ready to turn off the stage lights just yet.

“People have been predicting the death of theater so long,” said Thompson, at The California, “that I don’t believe it anymore.”

Miller, at Spreckels, puts it another way.

“Theater has been around for millennia,” she said. ”Clearly there is a human need for it. It’s not going anywhere.“