This Friday, a production of “Guys and Dolls” will kick off at Washougal High School’s performing arts center. But what makes these upcoming performances of this beloved musical different is the cost of admission. It’s entirely pay-what-you-can, which means that cost will not be a barrier for anyone interested in seeing this high-tempo tale of gamblers, grifters and showgirls.
That philosophy is at the heart of Columbia Theater Arts Foundation, the nonprofit theater company staging “Guys and Dolls.” CTAF launched its first production last October, with five performances of “Sound and Music.” According to Michael McCormic Jr., the executive artistic director of CTAF, attendees paid an average of $12 a seat for those nearly sold-out shows. McCormic, who is also starring in “Guys and Dolls,” says that ticket sales cover about half of the cost of CTAF’s productions, with the rest paid for by individual donations and corporate sponsors.
The Columbian recently profiled CTAF and its pay-what-you-can pricing model, which McCormic says is unique in the Portland metro region among theater companies. He joins us to discuss his vision for making theater more accessible in Southwest Washington where few municipal performing arts venues exist.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Starting this Friday, you can pay what you want to see the gamblers, grifters and showgirls of “Guys and Dolls.” It’s a second production of the Vancouver-based nonprofit Columbia Theater Arts Foundation, whose mission is to make theater more accessible in Southwest Washington. Guys and Dolls will be at the Washburn Performing Arts Center in Washougal. Michael McCormic Jr. is the executive artistic director of CTA Foundation. He joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Michael McCormic Jr.: Yeah, great to be here, Dave. Thanks for the invite.
Miller: What made you want to start this company?
McCormic: Oh, man. I grew up on the stage. I did a lot of youth theater, moved away for college, came back to the area and wanted to get right back into performing again when I came home, and realized there really are not a whole lot of opportunities, especially in the Vancouver/ Clark County area for all-ages performing. After spending some time working in the youth theater sphere, I got some friends together and we said, “You know, what would it take for us to put something together for all-ages performers, for adults, for seniors, for kids, to all be able to do this together?” That was about two years ago, and so here we are.
Miller: Were there models for this that you could copy?
McCormic: There were. Specifically, with the pay-what-you-will model, that was one of the things that was really important to us from the get-go, was making sure that whatever we did was going to be accessible for our community, not just from the stage, but also from the audience.
I had been out in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania area, visiting a friend who had moved out there to pursue a theater career. At the time she was in a production of “Fiddler on the Roof” with a company called Servant Stage. Servant Stage is a company that does very similar to what we’re doing in that they’re all-ages and they’re all pay-what-you-will productions. So anybody that wants to see the show can come in and they can get a ticket for whatever they’re able to pay and get to experience this art form that we love so much.
Miller: How does it actually work in practice, the pay-what-you-will, pay-what-you-can model?
McCormic: Well, from the audience’s perspective, it’s pretty easy. You go to our website, you get a ticket for however much it is you want to pay for it, that gives you options. You can pay $0, you can pay $10, you can pay $20. I think it goes up to $100 per ticket. Or if you want to just add a specific donation at the end of your purchase, you just select $0 and then there’s a page that pops up that says, “Would you like to make an additional donation?” You can put in an amount there, and that’s really how people are able to get their tickets that way.
Miller: I mentioned this is the second production. The first was “The Sound of Music.”
McCormic: “The Sound of Music”, yep.
Miller: You’re going for classics. We can talk about programming in just a second, but how much did people pay, on average, for “The Sound of Music”?
McCormic: “The Sound of Music”, we sold 1,829 tickets. We had…
Miller: You know this. You did not consult notes to tell me that number just there.
McCormic: No, we had…
Miller: You knew the exact number of tickets.
McCormic: Yeah, we had a total of 1,830 tickets available. So I knew it was one less than what we had available. You know, for our first show to have one ticket that wasn’t sold, to me that was a good reminder that there’s always room for improvement. So…
Miller: Okay, so out of those about 1,800 or so tickets, what was the average price?
McCormic: We had an average ticket sale coming in the door of about $12. We averaged, there were about a quarter of our tickets were $0 tickets. That meant a quarter of our audience was able to come in and experience this, that otherwise wouldn’t have been able to, or wouldn’t have been interested in experiencing theater, paying money for it. I consider that a huge success, that we had a quarter of our audience that was able to be there and experience that because of the way we’re doing this.
Miller: When you add up ticket revenue and then the donations, that’s also an option on your website, people can make an additional donation. Is that enough to pay for the cost of the production?
McCormic: No, and we knew that going into this when we started this company. We’re not unique in that we rely on multiple revenue sources as a company to actually be able to stay open. Any nonprofit theater group that you run into is gonna be bringing in money from ticket sales, of course, corporate sponsorships, charitable donations from individuals in the community that wanna see the organization succeed, and then volunteers. We save money by having volunteer hours.
So, any nonprofit group that does what we do, operating on all those sources of revenue. The difference is, we just don’t assign the ticket price. That’s literally the only difference is that we’re not saying, “This is how much it costs to see our show.”
Miller: I want to go back to what you said before, that one of the first things that you realized, that the hole that you experienced yourself after doing theater as a young person, was when you became an adult, that there weren’t too many opportunities to perform in all-ages productions. What’s the importance to you of multi-generational performance, having seniors, people in middle age, maybe teenagers, all part of a production together?
McCormic: I’m of the philosophy that the performing arts isn’t just for the professionals. I think it’s wonderful to see when people are able to make that a career and are able to make money out of it, but I also think that art isn’t something to be commodified or monetized. I do it because I love it, because I think it’s something that God made me good at and I wanna be able to do it regardless of what else I’m doing in my life – whether I’m working full time in sales in my day job, I still have this as something to come and just express myself through.
And I wanna see other people be able to do that too. I think there are people that have gotten to live through this experience through their lives, people who are well along into their years that have this wisdom and this experience to impart on young performers. It’s a beautiful thing to see people who have all this experience, or who are in a pre-professional sphere of, they want to pursue this as a career but aren’t yet quite to that point where it’s their full paycheck, but get to come and be part of a show like what we’re doing and get to impart some of their experience and their wisdom onto young performers who are still coming up through the ranks.
Miller: What is the age range that you’ve had in terms of the performers in these two productions?
McCormic: In Sound of Music, I think our youngest performer was eight years old, our Gretel… no, it was our Marta, actually, was our youngest performer, in Sound of Music, and then our oldest performer was our butler, Franz the butler, who I believe is in his late 70s, so, I mean…
Miller: All working together in the same production.
McCormic: All working together in the same production
Miller: Which is, I think I may have said this before, but it does seem increasingly that there are fewer and fewer opportunities for that kind of intergenerational mingling in contemporary American life. A lot of young people spend time with young people and old people with old people, and aside from families there’s not always that much mixing. What do you see as the biggest challenges right now in keeping the Columbia Theater Arts Foundation strong going forward?
McCormic: I mean, finances… it’s always a challenge, especially when you’re working with a company that’s all pay-what-you-will, when we’re not demanding anything from anybody. Our philosophy is to ask politely and never demand, and that…
Miller: That’s the public broadcasting model.
McCormic: Yeah, yeah, and we want to keep doing what we’re doing for as long as we can, and I’ve said from the beginning, when we got our team together, I said, there’s a chance that this area might not be ready for what we’re trying to do here. I hope that’s not the case. So far it has not been the case.
But really, the thing that we run into as a company is that because we’re not putting a ticket price on our shows, the shows have to be good in order for us to prove our value to our audience. If people come in and they see a show that they love, that moves them, that touches them, that they walk away from with something to think about, or just feeling like they got some good value out of what they saw, they’ll usually donate to our company. And the next time they come and see a show, they might pay a little bit more for their ticket.
It’s kind of a chicken/egg scenario, where we’re never after the money for the money’s sake, but it does help us put on a good show. You know, the more of a budget we’re able to put to a production, the better of a show we’re able to put on and the fewer constraints we have on our team. And so to be able to put on a good show, we have to have the budget to do it. And in order to have the budget to do it, we have to put on a good show to prove to our audience that it’s worth what they’re paying for their pay-what-you-will ticket.
Miller: And to be clear, you are paying the performers.
McCormic: We are.
Miller: The musicians, the actors... As opposed to, you’re not getting a salary, you’re a volunteer and some of the other executives, but the performers do get paid.
McCormic: Yeah, when we put this together, we’ve been very fortunate to have people that believe in the cause enough to not take a paycheck at this point. We’d love to grow the company to the point where we can, but right now with the money that we have available, we really want to put that into our productions, into the quality of our shows.
And so, yeah, we’re paying our actors, we’re paying our directors, our choreographer, our vocal director, our orchestra director, most of our orchestra members, a handful of our production leads that are handling things like tech, like sets, costumes, things like that. We’re doing our best to pay our people, it’s not enough for anybody to make a full-time living off of, but it’s enough to at least make it worth their time to participate and hopefully they come back and do it again with us in the future.
Miller: How have you decided your programming? “The Sound of Music” first, and “Guys and Dolls” starting this coming Friday?
McCormic: We started with Sound of Music because it’s a show that people know. It really sells itself. And if we can put on Sound of Music and people like it, then that’s a good indication of our ability as a company. It’s a hard show to do well, but we figured we would have the people we did. It was laying my own part in it aside, we just had such a wonderful cast and a wonderful team that brought that show together, and it was a beautiful thing to get to sit back and just enjoy from the audience after directing them up to that point.
Miller: Now you can’t do that for “Guys and Dolls” because you’re one of the leads.
McCormic: I am in it.
Miller: You are a guy. You are Guy Masterson…
McCormic: Sky Masterson.
Miller: Sky Masterson in “Guys and Dolls.” You have just about 45 seconds left, but what’s it been like to get on stage again?
McCormic: Oh man. The community of people that we have in this cast is just lovely. And I catch a lot of crap from people, “Oh, Michael, you go and start this company and now you get to star on the show. Oh, how very original of you.” But I get to do the show with people I’ve known and loved for a long time. Several of the people that I’m playing opposite of, I grew up doing theater with.
Miller: And now you’re doing it again.
McCormic: And now we’re doing it again.
Miller: Michael, congratulations and thanks very much.
McCormic: Thank you.
Miller: Michael McCormic Jr. is the executive artistic director of the Columbia Theater Arts Foundation. The nonprofit is about to put on a pay-what-you-will production of “Guys and Dolls.” It premieres this Friday. It’s at the Washburn Performing Arts Center in Washougal.
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