June 12, 2003 | Read Time: 6 minutes
A small plaque hanging in the hallway of the American Airlines Theatre — the elegant Broadway home of the
Roundabout Theatre Company — honors three people with the lines, “They dreamed it, they got it built, they got it paid for.”
Todd Haimes, Roundabout’s artistic director, gladly shares this public recognition with his two longtime deputies, Ellen Richard and Julia C. Levy.
Mr. Haimes, who celebrates 20 years at the Roundabout this year, relied heavily on the skills of these two women to help him transform the once-bankrupt nonprofit theater into a place that produces Tony Award-winning plays and musicals for its 40,000 season-ticket holders. Together, Mr. Haimes and Ms. Levy raised nearly $25-million to renovate the historic site on 42nd Street that became the American Airlines Theatre — and the Roundabout’s first permanent home — while Ms. Richard guided the renovation.
Mr. Haimes says his faith in his two colleagues — Ms. Richard’s job is to keep the company running smoothly, while Ms. Levy concentrates on fund raising — allows him to focus on the artistic and long-term goals of the theater.
Mr. Haimes recruited Ms. Richard, whom he worked with previously at the Hartman Theater, in Stamford, Conn., to be the theater’s general manager 19 years ago. Ms. Levy joined the theater 14 years ago and is executive director of external affairs.
“I’m very delegatory. I do really well with hiring self-motivated people,” says Mr. Haimes. “Ellen and Julia are the most dramatic examples, and all the way down the line are people who are highly independent and thrive on being given more and more authority.”
Plenty of Freedom
Ms. Richard, who oversees all of the internal theater operations — including marketing, box-office sales, ticket subscriptions, and the maintenance of the theaters — relishes the freedom Mr. Haimes gives her. “It’s a very unique structure,” she says. “I like having a lot of autonomy and that’s what I get by working with Todd.”
After spending her early years helping the Roundabout to a solid fiscal footing, Ms. Richard hit upon an idea that today is helping Roundabout keep its seats filled, even in the depressed economy.
In 1991, she devised a special subscription package for singles that offered people the opportunity to attend performances with other single people, and then mingle after the show at a reception, an idea that was quickly copied at other theaters around the country.
The theater promoted the program in its newsletter, and advertised in the personals section of New York magazine and in other publications New Yorkers in their 30s might read. At its peak, the series had 3,000 subscribers, and currently has about 1,000. Now called the Solo Series, the program’s success quickly spawned other such packages, such as the Early-to-Bed Series, for ticket buyers who prefer a 7 or 7:30 curtain time instead of the typical 8, and the Wine Tasting Series, where patrons sample wines after shows at a reception hosted by a wine expert.
While not all series ideas have worked — a tea series fizzled, for example — they have helped attract new audiences: Fifteen percent of the theater’s 40,000 subscribers participate in one of the nine current series. The series concept is now emulated at theaters around the country, says Ben Cameron, executive director of Theatre Communications Group, but at the time the Roundabout was “a real pioneer.”
The group continues to seek creative ways to find new audiences and donors. At the suggestion of a staff member, the Roundabout started Hiptix, a program geared toward young professionals that includes e-mailed offers of discounted tickets. The two-year-old program now has an e-mail list of 3,000 names. Some Hiptix participants are also invited to special play readings and other events, in the hope that they will become donors in the future.
Negotiating Skills
Ms. Richard and Ms. Levy each fill a role necessary to the theater’s success — good negotiator, social fund raiser — that Mr. Haimes is more than happy not to occupy.
Now the theater’s managing director, Ms. Richard, as Mr. Haimes readily admits, is a tougher negotiator than he is, and is not afraid to question artistic decisions in order to keep the theater fiscally responsible. “He always said he never wanted a ‘yes person’ around him, and that’s why he got me,” she says with a laugh. However, Mr. Haimes usually has the last word: Ms. Richard recently lost a bid to cut a week of rehearsal time from Nine, one of the Roundabout’s current shows, starring Antonio Banderas. Still, she felt she made her point by presenting the option.
In Ms. Levy Mr. Haimes found an extrovert who oversees the theater’s fund-raising duties, taking some of the social pressure off him.
“I don’t have the passion and personality of some great leaders of institutions, which I think can be enormously helpful in fund raising,” he says.
However, he keeps in close contact with board members through phone calls, and often writes notes to small but loyal donors at Ms. Levy’s suggestion.
During Ms. Levy’s tenure, she has helped increase contributions to the theater from around $500,000 annually to more than $6-million by recruiting more than 800 donors who give $1,750 or more. She has also helped shift the board toward being fund raisers for — and donors to — the theater instead of merely advisers. Every board member must give at least $15,000 annually, a sum the board is now considering increasing.
For the renovation of the American Airlines Theatre, Ms. Levy secured $11-million in grants from the city and the state, by meeting with government officials and talking with them about why the Roundabout, which attracted 342,000 people to its shows last year, would be an asset to 42nd Street.
She is now concentrating on increasing the number of board members from 29 to about 40 and raising $40-million for an as-yet-unannounced capital campaign, $7-million of which has already been committed. Most of the donations will go to increasing the theater’s endowment.
But Ms. Levy says her history with the theater prevents the fund-raising success from swelling her head. “None of us, between Todd, Ellen, and me, forget what it was like when I first started,” she says. “For example, when we had a reception, I went to Fairway and bought the groceries and peeled the crudités at home.”
Today, she says, “we can’t get away with me going to the grocery store — there are higher expectations. We do have to keep up with the Joneses, but we try and do it as economically as we possibly can.”
