It's a fact

The horror

Another Halloween has come and gone. Another season of hoax candy tampering and yelling about racist costumes is behind us. Also, the Twin Cities Horror Festival has wrapped up its fourth year.

The Horror Fest, which grew steadily in its first three years, jumped in attendance this year, up at least 25% over last year. According to a press release that somehow made its way into my inbox:

"We're still working on our official accounting, but preliminary numbers indicate that TCHF IV issued nearly 3,000 tickets (600 more than last year) and generated around $28,500 in ticket revenue, 85% of which will be going straight to our 12 artist groups… we broke 9 single day attendance records, and also beat our single show attendance record."

I guess Minnesota likes being scared, which is good, because the Horror Festival will be rising from the dead again for the fifth time next year, October 27-November 6.

Is it Fringey enough for you now?!

In other festival news…

I gotta hand it to the Fringe Festival's executive director, Jeff Larson. He deftly lured us into his trap. Larson took over as the new leader of the Fringe last year and lulled us into a false sense of security by continuing to run the Fringe in the same competent manner as his predecessors and helping the festival to set another attendance record.

But just yesterday, the Fringe dropped a major bombshell, and Larson's true intentions were revealed. He has a sinister plan to increase attendance, encourage audience members to take chances on more shows and increase artist payout. In a press release that went out on Monday, the Fringe announced that the 2015 festival will do away with single ticket sales and punch passes and deal exclusively in day passes.

This will be the biggest change to the Fringe Festival since they started letting ping pong balls handle jurying, and I have no idea how it will affect audiences and performers in the 2016 festival. It may be awesome for everyone involved. It may be chaos. Actually, it may be both, since the biggest criticism that people have leveled against the festival in recent years is that they think there's not enough chaos there anymore. Regardless, it should be fun for me, since I greatly enjoy watching people freak out over change.

If you have questions about the coming ticketing changes, the Fringe has provided a Q&A on the front page of their website, and they will be hosting a town hall meeting to discuss the new plan at their office on November 23rd at 7pm. So, get your torches, pitchforks, celebratory banners, endless lists of anxious questions scribbled on tear-stained paper in the middle of another sleepless night and any other reactionary implements that you feel you need to bring to the table and get on down there. It should be good times.

Good news, everyone!

Theatre Communications Group is out with its annual Theatre Facts survey for 2014, which seeks to give an overview of the state of theater in America. The Facts are a condensation from TCG's more comprehensive annual fiscal survey, and, though they don't necessarily represent the entirety of theater in American, the report is usually a good indicator for the overall health of the industry.

As per usual, American Theatre Magazine (a publication by TCG) found optimism in the report, saying that, even though the financial landscape for the nonprofit theater world is still rocky at best, it's probably the least bad since the financial crash of 2008. Individual donations and foundation giving seem to be creeping back up, which has helped rescue the bottom line for a number of organizations.

But, other people looking at the same published numbers pulled out the nasty Facts that TCG usually tries to downplay: though donations to nonprofits have increased a little, actual attendance at nonprofit theaters has continued to shrink for yet another year, which has led to organizations raising ticket prices to plug financial holes. (As we've learned recently from the Soap Factory, you can't exactly rely on foundations and grants to keep you going, even if they are starting to give more again.)

And, as if it couldn't get any worse, Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings says that theater in America will soon be dead. EVERYBODY PANIC!

At the same time across the pond, UK regional theaters are reporting an increase in ticket sales of 2.4%. Theaters in the UK broke sales records last year, topping over £1 billion for the first time. (That's about $1.5 billion for those of you who refuse to acknowledge any of those funny European currencies) This might have to do with the fact that they have also increased ticket prices to make up for their own erosion of arts funding there; but we should take our good news where we can get it.

It's business

Of course, those modest gains in ticket sales in the UK have come mostly due to an increase in the production there of big family-friendly musicals. Your average MBA grad would look at that say "There's your growth industry. Get us another Disney show pronto! And make me some charts and graphs about it. Any kind of charts and graphs. I just really need some charts and graphs."

But there are other questions and concerns that this surface-level supply and demand viewpoint fails to address. Namely, who are nonprofit theaters for?

Back in the UK, one of my favorite Brits, Lyn Gardner, dropped an opinion article recently asking whether big nonprofits should continue to be unresponsive cultural palaces that rich people can give money to or whether they should actually serve larger populations.

"Oh, that's easy!" says our theoretical MBA. "Just give away some of your tickets to poor people. Problem solved. Now, let's have a business meeting to talk about business stuff. On a conference call. I love conference calls!"

As we've been learning, though, "free nights" from cultural organizations don't actually increase the number of people from underserved populations that walk in their doors. This could be because high-dollar cultural organizations usually design their programming around very specific ideas of what "culture" is. Which is to say that, even if you get a traditionally underserved population in the door, they have trouble finding something that seems like it was made for them.

"So, they don't buy what we're selling, and they don't want it when we give it away for free?" says Mr. MBA. "Why should I care? It's kid-friendly musicals from here on out. As many as you can cram in. No way that will ever fail. Is there anyway I can turn this into a complicated derivative? Financial bubbles don't make themselves, you know."

OK, let's keep this in business terms. Instead of thinking of whole classes of people as "underserved populations", why not think of them as "untapped markets"? Not to bring up Hamilton again, but let's bring up Hamilton again, since this musical that speaks directly to scads of untapped markets just knocked the Disney juggernaut The Lion King off the best-selling slot on Broadway. Isn't that good business?

Anyway, back here at home, the newly-minted Joe at our own big regional theater has been out there on the road in Minnesota actually listening to the community he's supposed to be serving, which, unfortunately, is a pretty radical proposition. Hopefully he's picked up a few business tips.

Give 'Til It Hurts

Be prepared, Minnesota. This Thursday you will be mercilessly bombarded with pleas for money from just about every nonprofit organization in the state that you have had even the most fleeting contact with. If you even just walked down the street past a nonprofit's headquarters at any point in the past 12 months, get ready for the asks. Your social media feeds will be clogged. Your email will be drowning in requests. An army of nonprofit workers are already plotting ways past your defenses to get at that sweet cash swimming around in your pockets.

It's November, and it's time for this year's Give to the Max Day.

Last year, GiveMN, which organizes the event and provides the online platform for donations, reported a record-setting day with over $18 million in donations in one 24-hour period. This was even topping the previous record set in 2013 when traffic on the site was so big that you well-meaning donors broke the GiveMN website.

This year, GiveMN is shooting for topping themselves again without turning their servers into smoking hunks of molten plastic and exploded neodymium by offering you a chance to schedule donations ahead of time. But, I believe in you, Minnesota. No matter what kind of upgrades they've made, I believe that you can crash this website again. So, let's get out there and smother GiveMN with your generosity. Hold your generosity tightly down over its face until it stops moving. It's the only way.

And if you still need a reason to give, Minnesota Monthly has provided us with a short list of hip kids who will be donating this year. Don't you want to be hip, too? Really, you've got no excuse.