Struggling Citi Center seeks collaborations
By Geoff Edgers, Globe Staff | August 10, 2007
The Citi Performing Arts Center has launched talks with First Night, which organizes Boston's popular New Year's celebration, and other local arts and culture groups with the aim of merging or partnering with them.
The efforts are central to a new five-year strategic plan for the Citi Center, formerly the Wang Center for the Performing Arts. Once a key player on the Boston arts scene, the Center is now struggling as it faces financial losses, criticism from arts advocates, and an ever-decreasing slate of programming at its key venues, the Wang and Shubert theaters.
Under the plan, the Center will become what it calls a "virtual performing arts center." The idea is to reduce financial risk by relying less on revenue from the Center's hard-to-fill theaters while spreading the Center's brand across a swath of revenue-generating programming elsewhere in Boston and Massachusetts. There are no plans to sell the Wang or Shubert theaters, officials say.
"I don't think I've ever been, in my 21 years, more excited about where we're going," said Josiah Spaulding Jr., Citi Center's president and chief executive officer, in a recent interview at the Center boardroom in which he outlined the strategic plan. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."
Spaulding said the Center has signed confidentiality agreements with groups it has approached for mergers and partnerships, but according to sources at the organizations involved, they include First Night, the Boston Cyberarts Festival, Lenox-based Shakespeare & Company, and Young Audiences of Massachusetts, a chapter of the national nonprofit that works to bring arts education programs into schools.
Leaders of the groups approached by Spaulding say it is still too early to know whether deals can be struck.
"I want to hear what Joe has to say," said George Fifield, founder of the Boston Cyberarts Festival. "I'm open to talking to anybody. The fact is, if somebody's got something good to offer to me, and if it works, great. If it doesn't, it doesn't."
The strategic plan was developed over two years and endorsed by the Center's board last year, with a second phase approved this June. In a September 2006 draft provided to the Globe, the plan calls for garnering corporate sponsorhips and philanthropic donations and creating a "technology backbone" with "E-based marketing, E-based ticket sales, and sophisticated data tracking to sell and cross-market products" for various arts organizations. The Center would also offer others its "professional theater management expertise as an outsourcing service."
As part of the plan, the Center has cut funding for its own programming, such as the free Shakespeare on the Common; downsized its board from 72 trustees to 33, who are now required to contribute a minimum of $5,000 or $10,000 a year, depending on their board status; and hired a new chief strategic officer, Sue Dahling Sullivan, and chief development officer, Nancy Sullivan Skinner. The Center's former marketing staff is gone; a new chief marketing officer, still to be hired, will build a marketing team.
The plan has its critics. After looking at a draft, William Crittenden, senior associate dean at Northeastern University's College of Business Administration, praised the Center for bringing in new management and cutting back on activity to reduce its deficit. But he questioned why other, smaller groups would want the Center to manage their operations.
"Are they really that good at ticketing and marketing and the use of technology?" Crittenden said. "If they are, why haven't they been able to be more effective over the last few years?"
Dennis R. Young, director of the nonprofit studies program at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies in Atlanta, gave the Center credit for recognizing that changes had to be made.
"Generally, they've defined a sensible direction," said Young. "They've got a vision here. What I don't see in the plan are the specific steps they're going to take to move to that vision."
But Center trustees say the plan will reinvent the way they do business.
"We're trying to make a permanent, stable platform for the arts here in Boston out of the turmoil of the last seven years," said John William Poduska Sr., chairman of the Center's board of trustees. "We've got so many balls in the air," he said. "We can't tell you what's going to happen with mergers and acquisitions. We do seem to be getting some wins."
One of those wins came, Poduska said, last November, when New York-based Citigroup agreed to pay $34 million over 15 years for naming rights to the longtime Wang Center for the Performing Arts.
A smaller victory came in June, when the Boston Foundation announced that the Center would receive $225,000, the largest single grant in its most recent round of allocations. But the award came with a catch: The Center received only a third of the money. Each of two remaining payments would be made when the Center signs mergers, which the Boston Foundation promotes as ways to save money by cutting administrative costs.
Some arts advocates are wary of the idea of making deals with the Center. They point to the decision by Commonwealth Shakespeare Company to become part of the then-Wang Center in 2003. Under the Center umbrella, the Shakespeare on the Common program initially grew. But this summer, the Center's leaders came under fire for cutting the Shakespeare budget in half, even as they paid Spaulding a $1.2 million "retention" bonus. CSC founder Steven Maler's salary has been cut, and he remains in limbo as he waits to hear whether the Center will bring him back to direct next year's production.
Joan Moynagh, one of CSC's cofounders and a Citi Center trustee until June, criticized the Boston Foundation for giving the Center the grant.
"I think anyone would rather see that go to a company that's actually producing something," she said. "Don't give it to [Spaulding] to pay his consultants to figure out a way to partner with smaller organizations. Give it to the smaller organizations. This virtual arts institution model, I don't think anyone gets."
Martha H. Jones, president of the Celebrity Series of Boston, also has questions. For a decade, she and Spaulding collaborated to bring prominent dance companies to the Wang Theatre. Last fall, Spaulding told Jones the Center would no longer partner with the Celebrity Series for the project.
"It's a mystery," Jones said of plans at the Center, where the lack of activity has been surprising. "People say, 'Hey, Marti, do you know what's going on at the [Center?]' I say, 'I don't see a lot coming out of there.' "
Peg Golden, a theater producer and former Citi Center trustee, calls the current lack of activity "embarrassing."
In fact, the slowdown at the Center has been by design, as leaders cut expenses so they can balance their budget after years of deficits. In the 1990s, the Wang Center's glory days, Spaulding boasted of holding performances 96 percent of the nights possible. But over the last year, the 3,600-seat Wang Theatre has hosted performances less than 30 percent of the time. And of the 131 performances there, 54 were the "Radio City Christmas Spectacular" and 44 were Boston Ballet performances.
On nights the theater is dark, the Center has been increasingly open to renting out spaces for private functions, said Lynne Kortenhaus, a trustee who serves as the Center's spokeswoman. Those events, she says, can help in the long run as the Center works to build its audience.
"Yes, we have weddings, we have parties, but guess what, that's the public that maybe is taking its first step into our institution," she said.
Robert Sachs, the trustee who chaired the strategic planning committee, said he is excited about the future.
"We think we've been totally honest with ourselves about our shortcomings and our needs, and we are taking steps to address those needs and to leverage our strengths," he said. "We feel we kind of have our arms around the issues and we've made some excellent hires over the last year. If anybody can accomplish this, we believe we have a team in place. It's going to take more work and continued commitment on the part of trustees and management alike."
