“I like fixing things. I’m drawn generally to things that need my help. I like the process and I love small nonprofits.” So says Marjorie Waldo, who has found a small nonprofit that needs her help and has jumped head-first into the fray as president and CEO of Delray Beach’s beleaguered storefront performance complex, The Arts Garage.
Waldo, on the job since Nov. 1, has already made waves when — six weeks later — she suspended The Garage’s theater program for this season, cauterizing its financial bleeding. Two shows, including a likely money-making revue starring Avery Sommers, have been scratched and the contracts of all theater staffers have been ripped up.
Surprisingly, then, Waldo, 53, is no hard-boiled bean-counter, but a self-described “theater fan” who graduated from University of Virginia where she was a drama major.
“I don’t want to sound like I don’t want theater. I desperately want theater back here,” she said in a phone conversation in mid-December. “I have some ideas of how I want to make it happen. I’d like to make a business plan for theater that shows it can sustain itself.”
In her own folksy way, Waldo suggests that The Arts Garage may be back in the theater business by the fall of 2017.
“My instinct is to tell you, on my daughter’s head, there will be theater here by September,” she says. “But I don’t want to throw my daughter into this because I will make a business decision. And I only do sure bets when I put it on my daughter’s head.”
The Arts Garage began producing plays and musicals in 2012 under Lou Tyrrell, the former artistic director of Florida Stage. He struggled to develop an audience in Delray for the new works that are his professional passion and he parted company with the Garage two seasons ago. His replacement, Keith Garsson, backed off from offering premieres, but was successful with such edgy, small-cast shows as Sex with Strangers and a Bessie Smith revue, The Devil’s Music — both of which proved popular with audiences and had extended runs.
This season, however, Garsson stubbed his toes twice, producing a pair of offbeat dramas, The Mystery of Love & Sex and Cuddles. Both were sizeable money losers, causing Waldo to pull the theater plug. “In two months, the first two months of my fiscal year, the losses during that time were staggering,” she reports. “They would not be easy to recoup.
“Equally importantly, a lot of the expenses needed to start the third play were upfront expenses. So holding that loss from the first two months and then looking at large infusions (of cash) for beginning the third show was just a huge and unnecessary risk.”
In contrast, the music programs at The Arts Garage provide a small profit, enough to fund the organization’s education and outreach work. Still, Waldo became concerned that the losses from the theater could sink the whole operation. “If we continued at that rate, yes, it would threaten the survival,” she says.
Before she can restructure the theater program and reactivate it, Waldo wants to fill those now-dark weeks with music concerts. “Oh, we’re booking like crazy. That’s how we’ll recoup,” she believes. “My thought is by the end of this fiscal year, we should not show a loss. I’m hoping we’ll break even.”
Waldo wants to withhold her plans for the theater program until she studies it further, but her initial thoughts point to problems with needlessly expensive sets and the cost of employing Equity actors.
“What I want to do is remember that we are called The Arts Garage. That I can hear the cars pulling into the garage above my head in my office. We need to not try to be what we’re not. We’re funky, cool, hip, alternative. We’re a garage. So we need to think outside of that box.”
“There’s ways to do symbolic sets that would make a huge impact on the budget,” says Waldo. “Our problem was largely income, but it was partially outgo. We need to put on theater that moves people, engages people, but that is self-sustaining.”
Asked if she expects Garsson to be part of the Garage’s future theater plans, Waldo responds, “I can’t answer that directly. Because we discontinued everything, we discontinued all contractor services connected to theater. Until I devise a plan, I won’t know who is the right person for that.”
Waldo is a big believer in focus groups, so part of her further fact-finding will include listening to audience members’ opinions of what they have seen at The Arts Garage, as well as to other theater professionals and reviewers.
“Then,” she says, “I’ll make my own ideas out of what they give me.”