Leavenworth’s Multi-Decade Run of 'The Sound of Music' is a Great Theatre Success Story
“The Sound of Music” at Leavenworth Summer Theater. (Stephen Hufman/Leavenworth Summer Theater)
Greg Ehrhardt, OnStage Blog Editorial Staff
The Washington Post had an interesting feature (subscription required) on the Leavenworth Summer Theater Company's nearly 30-year run performing the classic ‘The Sound of Music’ in Leavenworth, Washington.
The feature was friendly, detailing the unique environment making ‘The Sound of Music’ a one-of-a-kind destination for watching the iconic musical, given the mountainous landscape and how the surrounding Bavarian-themed village recreates the look and feel of Austria (the area has been this way since the 1960s).
‘The Sound of Music’ has been performed annually in Leavenworth since 1995 and is one of three shows performed there yearly.
The piece doesn’t get into specifics of how hot a ticket this is for the vacation hot spot, but the pictures shown in the piece indicate it was a sold-out show, and the theatre claims on its website that more than 20,000 people attend a show every summer.
On one hand, this is a great success story for regional theatre. The company recognized the opportunity and made it a big enough success to be recognized by the Washington Post. It wouldn’t surprise me if most shows were sellouts, and theatre being a part of the must-do list for visitors to the gorgeous scenic area of Washington is a win-win.
However, there are good and bad lessons to be learned for community and regional theatre at large.
In a way, you can never technically perform ‘The Sound of Music’ authentically in America, given it’s a play based in Austria. But that aside, having a place in America that would represent the “must-see” location to see ‘The Sound of Music’ performed amongst the mountains is a fantastic idea, especially since Leavenworth was already Bavarian-themed to draw in tourists, and perhaps something other places could learn from.
Are there other locations in the world that could serve a similar experience that could represent a new item on a theatre fan’s bucket list to see before they leave this world?
An easy example would be having ‘1776’ performed in Washington D.C. every Summer (it would have to be during Summer when it’s the hottest, of course, and a daring theatre would either perform this outside or turn the air conditioning off inside to really make it feel like ‘1776’.)
The Washington Post piece wasn’t clear whether Leavenworth Summer Theater wanted to represent the mecca of ‘The Sound of Music’ productions. I suspect they wanted to offer tourists coming there for other reasons an additional attraction that was authentic to the Bavarian-themed village.
From a business perspective, it is a brilliant idea and a great way to commercially bring the arts to tourists who probably didn’t come to the area looking to see a show.
However, I do have concerns other regional or community theaters may learn the wrong lesson from this.
I have general concerns about theaters that play it safe with their show selection, because performing shows audiences have seen many times before is not good for the performers or the audiences in broadening their cultural IQ. Now, I understand how hard it can be to sell tickets to theatres that do not perform the hits. Usually, as Chris Peterson explained to me in the Theatre Advice episode below, you have to pick crowd-pleasers audiences have seen before to sell out shows.
I don’t have cultural IQ concerns for Leavenworth because their town population is under 3,000, and they draw over 2 million tourists annually. Their performances of ‘Sound of Music’ essentially act as a reason to visit the area, and tourism helps the community in many ways. Leavenworth Summer Theater is executing Broadway’s model on an extremely tiny scale. Good for them to recognize the opportunity.
But for other community theatre companies struggling to sell tickets, this may bring some ideas to pick a show, master it, and run it every year. It would certainly be more cost-efficient!
For the arts' sake, please don't do this unless you have an incredibly unique environment that would make a specific show special.
The arts thrive on challenging the audience, and the audience thrives by being challenged and presented with diverse options. The last thing the arts need is to become stale and familiar.
The best lesson for other community theatres to learn from this is: “How can you make your production special” for the layperson audience?
The Leavenworth Summer Theatre Company was lucky in that nature already gave them the mountains and other developers built a Bavarian-themed town before them. All they had to do was recognize the opportunity.
Most community and regional theatres won’t have the luck of geography to gift wrap them an opportunity to make a production unique.
However, making a production could be as simple as doing something with the characters that have never been done before. The Post piece details how Leavenworth does different things with the production every year, including changing the clarity of Rolfe’s moral compass and Maria’s level of spunkiness from year to year. I hope it’s always clear in every production that Rolfe was never the good guy, but at the very least, they aren’t afraid to make changes within the play and challenge the audience.
Leavenworth Summer Theatre is ultimately a great success story for theatre. I hope it sparks some great ideas all over the country. Let’s hope only the right lessons are learned from it.