Its successful partnership with Mission San Juan Capistrano for summer productions unexpectedly ends. Is there another place for SCR’s summer outdoor season?
When “The Old Man and the Old Moon” opens for previews July 20, it will mark the fourth consecutive summer of one of the most unique and successful artistic partnerships in Orange County history: Outside SCR, a collaboration between South Coast Repertory and the Mission San Juan Capistrano.
It will also be the last.
That news was announced last month in a press release touting the opening of “The Old Man,” a fanciful 2012 tale created by the frenetically talented PigPen Theatre Co., an indie folk ensemble and theater producer. But the decision was made “a few months ago,” SCR artistic director David Ivers said in mid-June.
It was a decision that was not SCR’s.
“It was the mission’s decision, which really bummed me out,” said Ivers, who first conceived Outside SCR in a pandemic-infused burst of inspiration and then helped guide it toward a success that exceeded expectations. “It was definitely my hope that we would continue at the mission, so to get a call saying that they had other priorities and (were) going to focus on those … it broke my heart.”
The Mission’s executive director, Mechelle Lawrence Adams, worked closely with Ivers and SCR’s outgoing managing director Paula Tomei to make the first outdoor production in the theater’s then 54-year history and the mission’s first external theater producer in its nearly 250-year history, happen in 2021 and the three years since. Though it was the mission’s decision, Adams had nothing but praise for the partnership between SCR and the Mission Preservation Foundation, the nonprofit that raises funds for the ongoing preservation of the mission, which was permanently founded on Nov. 1, 1776 as the second of 21 Spanish missions built along the coast of California.
“The Mission Preservation Foundation is proud of the partnership that was born during difficult times for…Orange County’s (premier) theatrical and historical entities,” she said. “It was a very positive experience for our members and team and overall. I believe we all succeeded during a time when we needed to be innovative and brave. Mutually, we all delivered on that promise.”
When asked if it was fair to say that the mission decided it was time to return to pre-pandemic programming, Lawrence Adams said, “Revisit all programming along with resources of staffing and needs of operation and budget.”
SCR’s Ivers, while saying there was nothing set in stone that the partnership would continue beyond a year-to-year basis, admits the mission’s decision to end the partnership was disappointing and an abrupt surprise. But there’s still one more show to mount and he is confident that if Outside SCR reemerges, it will have no problem replicating its success.
“We’ll have this summer and it will be great and they’ve been great partners and we’re sort of under construction to see what’s next,” Ivers said.
It’s Complicated
But what’s next is complicated. For Outside SCR to continue, a suitable outdoor venue would need to be found. It’s not that Ivers doubts the outdoor formula can work elsewhere. The past three years proved SCR can design a show in Costa Mesa and transport it en masse to an archaeologically sensitive site without unduly interfering with ongoing preservation efforts. But a great deal of Outside SCR’s success had to do with that venue; when, or if, Outside SCR reemerges, it will need a venue, Ivers said, that doesn’t need to be large as much as it must be “magical, unique and beautiful.”
Along with needing the right venue, there’s the not-so-small matter that SCR is currently seeking a new managing director to replace Tomei, who announced her retirement in November after serving 30 years as SCR’s managing director.
“This is an organization undergoing a leadership transition and we’ll have a new managing director coming in at some point, hopefully soon, and that person is going to be a new partner and maybe (Outside SCR) should be part of the conversation we have with that person about what our priorities are... Maybe instead of saying ‘here’s what we’re doing,’ we ask, ‘what do you think?’”
An Experiment with Benefits
Whatever comes next, the upcoming production will be the final chapter in a saga that began as a one-year experiment and exceeded all artistic and financial expectations. By the time the second summer of Outside SCR concluded in early August 2022, a surprisingly lucrative new revenue stream had opened for the theater. (SCR paid a venue fee to the mission but kept the gate).
How lucrative?
In the 50 public performances of the four musically themed productions in the 2021, 2022 and 2023 seasons, more than 21,000 tickets were sold.
“Those are big numbers for us,” Ivers said.
The ticket demand for Outside SCR was something no one at SCR anticipated, Ivers said in an interview last summer. Its first installment in 2021, which opened three months before SCR returned to indoor performances in front of a live audience, did well: productions of Jose Cruz Gonzalez’s “American Mariachi,” which SCR had staged in Ivers’ first full season at the helm, 2018-19, in repertory with the family-friendly musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.”
But the second season was a knockout: “Million Dollar Quartet,” a jukebox musical framed around a 1956 recording session featuring Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley. It sold nearly 9,000 tickets. Last year’s production of “La Havana Madrid” transported viewers to a legendary Chicago nightclub of the early 1960s. “It didn’t quite match ‘Quartet’” but “it came close,” Ivers said.
Those big numbers couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. Like most American theaters since the pandemic, SCR has navigated perilous financial waters. As of July 2023, season subscriptions had dropped 50 percent from pre-pandemic levels, and total attendance overall had dropped by 60 percent from 2018-19, due in part to fewer plays scheduled and therefore fewer performances.
In an email sent last July, Tomei said that while “we are starting to see single tickets trend higher, that increase is far from enough to make up for the drop in subscriptions.”
Analysis Time
Really what comes next for Outside SCR is something that often comes at the end of a relationship, Ivers said: “scrutiny and examination.” That analysis won’t be limited to a black and white decision of whether to “give it a break for a year and reemerge somewhere else, or to just go for it and pop up somewhere,” next summer, he said.
There is a third option.
“Do we use those resources and do something else really exciting and thrilling?” Ivers said.
Outside SCR was successful both in terms of generating revenue and exposing SCR to thousands of people who had never seen a show at the theater before. But it wasn’t free money,
“That’s part of the trick of it,” Ivers said. “(Outside SCR) does really well but it costs a lot. It costs a lot because it’s new and there are ways to ameliorate some of that cost and there are strategies but that’s really what the next part of the analysis has to include.
“I will tell you that I do not have a desire at all to let it go. I love it, I believe in it, but I am also not immune to understanding that resources are finite and we have to live within a budget and to sort out what our priorities are, and I am open to that conversation.”
Actualizing a Vision
Outside SCR may have been directly linked to the pandemic and SCR’s inability to mount theater indoors, but it also actualized one of the goals Ivers first articulated immediately after being named SCR’s second artistic director in September 2018. That goal was to bring to SCR the aggressive community outreach he implemented in his previous stops, including the Utah Shakespeare Festival and Arizona Theater Company.
And it all began with the name.
“It’s SCR Outside, but it’s just not outdoors,” Ivers told Voice of OC in 2021. “It’s also moving beyond ourselves. Let’s partner and embed ourselves in the community .… It’s a way to help SCR grow, to embrace the community that surrounds us and lift us up in a joyful way for the staff, the artists, and all who intersect with us.”
But a literal outdoor place would suit Ivers just fine.
The Man Wants Leads
Scrutiny and analysis are the operative buzzwords, and Ivers said he isn’t “aggressively” looking for a new outdoor venue at the moment, but he wouldn’t be averse to looking seriously at one if it appeared “Brigadoon”-like.
“It would be something to show” the incoming managing director, he said. “Just presenting some options.”
He even asked Culture OC for a solid on that front.
“I’m happy for you to put in your article that if anyone has an idea, or if they own a beautiful venue that they’d like to see Outside SCR in, feel free to contact David Ivers at ivers@scr.org. I’m not kidding, I want the community to be involved.”
‘The Old Man and the Old Moon’
The final Outside SCR production at Mission San Juan Capistrano, “The Old Man and the Old Moon,” is an epic folktale infused with folk music. The Old Man faithfully guards the moon and fills it with light for as far back as memory serves him and his wife. When a haunting melody pulls her away, stirring memories of their past together, the Old Man faces a heart-wrenching choice: uphold his lifelong duty or leave duty behind for love.
When: July 20 - Aug. 11
Where: Mission San Juan Capistrano, 26801 Old Mission Rd, San Juan Capistrano
Cost: $40 - 60
Contact: scr.org
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