More and more theaters

This is a corrected version of this column.

Rochester has a new performing arts space on East Avenue: a
breathtakingly beautiful, acoustically wonderful place named the Lyric Theatre.
And it provides something several studies say Rochester lacks: a mid-sized
theater for performances needing a smaller venue than the Eastman or the
Auditorium. The odds for its success, then, seem pretty good.

The Lyric occupies the former First Church of Christ,
Scientist, building, bought earlier this month by Rochester Lyric Opera. It’s a
preservation success story as well as an arts story, and the community owes the
church’s small congregation a huge thank-you for preserving this significant
structure.

So this is a very positive development, in many ways. But it
raises a big question: How many performing arts venues can Rochester support?

We’re about to find out.

In addition to the Lyric, the push continues for a new venue
for the Rochester Broadway Theatre League. City and county government are on
board, and City Hall is now reviewing proposals to study which location would
be best for it: the Midtown site or farther west on Main, between North Clinton
and St. Paul. It would likely need state funding, though, and that’s not
guaranteed.

As multi-use performance spaces, the Lyric and an RBTL
theater would join the Eastman Theatre and its smaller siblings, Kilbourn and Hatch Halls; the Nazareth Arts Center; the
Auditorium Theatre; the Main Street Armory; RAPA; Hochstein; MuCCC, and several churches and schools that host outside
events. And that doesn’t count Geva, Downstairs
Cabaret, Blackfriars, and the Jewish Community
Center’s CenterStage, which have their own
performance spaces.

Is that too many?

The new Lyric is already being put to use. Lyric Opera is holding
several events there this spring, summer, and fall,
and it’ll be a venue for this year’s Jazz and Fringe Festivals. Representatives
of the Rochester Philharmonic and the Eastman School have applauded the new
theater, and both hold performances that might very well use a hall this size.

A big plus: Lyric Opera owns the building, but the Jazz
Festival’s Mark Iacona and John Nugent will manage
it, and after renovations, they’ll be in charge of booking a variety of
performances. As they’ve proved over the past 14 years, they know what they’re
doing.

Then there’s the proposed theater for RBTL acts. RBTL
doesn’t want to own the theater, says board chair Arnie Rothschild, but it does want to operate it. The hope is that given RBTL’s big audience draw, the popularity of touring
Broadway shows, and the potential for a variety of additional bookings, a new
theater will be considered a good public investment and an entity like a public
benefit corporation will build and operate it.

Rochester could end up with a lot of theaters, then. That
could be terrific, for our own quality of life and for attracting businesses
and residents who want a lively, arts-oriented city. But it costs money to
operate theaters. Building or renovating is just the first step. To keep them
going takes big endowments, ticket sales, and continual fundraising, from big
donors and small.

Rothschild points to a 2010 study that says a new performing
arts facility for Broadway roadshows and similar events can operate without a
deficit. That study assumes that the new theater would have nearly double the
performances that the Auditorium Theatre has, but Rothschild insists that
there’ll be no deficit. The folks involved with the Lyric were optimistic about
its stability when they announced its creation, too.

Still, Rochester will have a lot of arts groups and venues
competing for support: for audience and for funding. And as I noted recently,
according to the latest ACT Rochester report, state funding for the arts in
this region dropped by almost 60 percent from 2001 to 2013. Kodak was once a
huge arts supporter.

Even without the Kodak of the past, though, this is a
relatively wealthy community. And many of us are passionate about the arts –
all kinds of arts. Are there enough of us?

We’re about to find out.

This article appears in Apr 22-28, 2015.