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The Globe and Mail: The Shaw Festival’s audience may have shrunk in 2012, but the southern Ontario theatre company has ended up in the black after two years of large deficits thanks to a “right sizing” that reined in expenditures.
This is an example of an interesting occurrence in a lot of companies. Sometimes all it takes to make a large change to a company is to change the management. The Shaw Festival was able to cut down their budget by $3 million just by replacing their financial manager. Sometimes a fresh set of eyes on a problem can come up with a solution faster than someone who was been focused on the problem for so long. I also wonder if replacing the financial manager was a decision made in order to help the situation, or if it was just a coincidence that the financial manager left when the theater was having difficulties.
Yeah, I have trouble believing that after two years of deficits, the financial manager chose to leave of their own volition...
It's great to see the theatre starting to make financial headway, but one of the commenters has a really good point - was the festival popular? There's no information in here, short of an attendance of ~500,000 for the season, that indicates the comparison with previous seasons. In other words, we know there's cost-cutting, but we don't know if there's been any boost in income. Perhaps an analysis of the best selling shows and constructing an audience-popular season would be more useful (or at least useful data to be able to evaluate cost-cutting vs. revenue-growing efforts).
I think this is a good example of no matter how big or renowned a theatre company you are they can never be two careful about the amount of money you spend. However a good idea it is to bring popular show to a season to attract audience I think it is a better idea to watch and limit the amount of money that is spent. It seems odd to me however that this festival could be losing money. I went to the Shaw festival last summer and attended four different performances. Every performance I attended the theatres were full. It seems to me that if this was true and they were still gathering debt that it is wasteful spending and spending that is losing them money. I would hate to see the Shaw Festival down size or even have to close because of this.
This article really disappoints me. They don't talk a whole lot about how the budget was shrunk, which for theatrical artists is a very important consideration. You don't get ride of $3 million in a budget by just making the shows smaller- that means that some people were no longer employed, and some other large changes were surely made. Maybe that makes for a better work environment, but maybe that has longer running implications (other than financial ones) that have yet to show themselves, and which this article doesn't at all comment on.
4 comments:
This is an example of an interesting occurrence in a lot of companies. Sometimes all it takes to make a large change to a company is to change the management. The Shaw Festival was able to cut down their budget by $3 million just by replacing their financial manager. Sometimes a fresh set of eyes on a problem can come up with a solution faster than someone who was been focused on the problem for so long. I also wonder if replacing the financial manager was a decision made in order to help the situation, or if it was just a coincidence that the financial manager left when the theater was having difficulties.
Yeah, I have trouble believing that after two years of deficits, the financial manager chose to leave of their own volition...
It's great to see the theatre starting to make financial headway, but one of the commenters has a really good point - was the festival popular? There's no information in here, short of an attendance of ~500,000 for the season, that indicates the comparison with previous seasons. In other words, we know there's cost-cutting, but we don't know if there's been any boost in income. Perhaps an analysis of the best selling shows and constructing an audience-popular season would be more useful (or at least useful data to be able to evaluate cost-cutting vs. revenue-growing efforts).
I think this is a good example of no matter how big or renowned a theatre company you are they can never be two careful about the amount of money you spend. However a good idea it is to bring popular show to a season to attract audience I think it is a better idea to watch and limit the amount of money that is spent. It seems odd to me however that this festival could be losing money. I went to the Shaw festival last summer and attended four different performances. Every performance I attended the theatres were full. It seems to me that if this was true and they were still gathering debt that it is wasteful spending and spending that is losing them money. I would hate to see the Shaw Festival down size or even have to close because of this.
This article really disappoints me. They don't talk a whole lot about how the budget was shrunk, which for theatrical artists is a very important consideration. You don't get ride of $3 million in a budget by just making the shows smaller- that means that some people were no longer employed, and some other large changes were surely made. Maybe that makes for a better work environment, but maybe that has longer running implications (other than financial ones) that have yet to show themselves, and which this article doesn't at all comment on.
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