Dad rock and all, the boys (and girls) are back in town at Akron’s live music and performance venues.
And local event promoters who are fielding their first live shows in nearly a year-and-a-half say the crowds are back, too.
Asked recently how he was doing, Akron Civic Theatre executive director Howard Parr seemed to have to pause and take a breath.
“Doing great, actually,” Parr said with some reflection. “I’m happy to be back at it.”
Parr’s been “at it” since 2007 at the Civic, and at other venues before that, so he knows a thing or two about the local live entertainment scene. After about a 15-month hiatus when the Civic had no shows due to COVID, Parr said he has been more than happy to return to serving audiences — and ecstatic to see they haven’t left him.
“What we’re seeing across the board is the numbers are basically what they would have been pre-pandemic, or better,” Parr said.
That includes not only the Civic, he said, but Lock 3 Park next door to the south, where he books performances, and the new, 200-plus capacity Knight Stage that opened this year in the Whitelaw Building in the Bowery District next door.
“We just had two really good weekends in a row,” Parr said. Recent events such as the band Midnight Star’s performance at Lock 3, the Akron Pride Festival’s Drag Battle on the Civic’s main stage and the Say it Loud live-theater event on the Knight stage have all drawn big crowds, he said.
“We had the Journey tribute (E5C4P3 on July 2 at Lock 3), that had between 5,500 and 6,000 people,” he said. “We’ve been hitting those numbers when the weather’s been good.”
But even on May 28, on a rainy night with temps in the 40s, about 1,000 people came to see the Aerosmith tribute band Draw the Line at Lock 3, the city reports.
In the arts downtown district, developer Tony Troppe has dubbed his developments the “Blu Zone.” They include Troppe’s Blue Jazz+ nightclub and Musica, both on East Market Street, and Maiden Lane Live!, an outdoor stage that Troppe opened nearby at the end of March.
“We’ve packed the house,” Troppe said. “The other night we had 300-plus people (at Musica) for Dear Hunter. It was very encouraging to see the line wrapped around the building.”
The show by Dear Hunter, a progressive rock band from Rhode Island, was canceled in 2020, but Troppe said he didn’t have to refund many tickets.
“Folks had tickets from 2020 and a lot of them held their tickets and waited for them to return. Plus, we sold another 200 or so tickets,” Troppe said.
Now Troppe said he’s enthusiastically booking more acts for all of his venues through the rest of the year, because he’s confident the crowds will keep coming. He said Blue Jazz+ is preparing to return in the fall, after he reopens his BLU-tique hotel at the corner of Main and Market streets. He opened the hotel in January 2020 to enthusiastic reviews, only to have to close it in March due to COVID.
“We have a great lineup at Musica. We had our third show this past week, and we’re gearing up for a great summer,” Troppe said. “We have a number of great shows lined up for the summer at our Maiden Lane venue. … The hotel’s going to be reopening the first week of August, and Blue Jazz+ should be coming online for our seventh anniversary” in November.
The return of live entertainment also is evident in the listings on the SummitLive365 website run by the arts-support organization ArtsNow in Akron. The site lets area artists and venues list their upcoming events for free.
In February 2020, just before the pandemic struck, the site listed 217 events. That number plummeted to just 67 events the next month, March, before reaching a nadir of just 33 events in December.
This year, the numbers have been going back up, with 78 live events listed in May and another 75 in the first 23 days of June, the latest figures available.
ArtsNow executive director Nicole Mullet said venues that have reopened are doing well, and more venues are opening all the time, but with an additional emphasis on safety. It will take a few months for the entire scene to be back in swing, she predicted.
“As we approach fall, I think we’ll see seasonal openings return to normal,” Mullet said.
It’s not as easy as just booking a band, stocking the bar and reopening the doors, according to Mullet and others.
“We are gearing up to reopen. We’ve had every service contractor in the universe in over the last few days getting all our equipment ready and our (air) filters cleaned,” said Jill Bacon Madden, owner and “chief vibe officer” at Jilly’s Music Room on North Main Street.
Bacon Madden said she has been working with other clubs nationally to develop safety protocols for reopening that she’ll apply at her club and share with other venue owners. But it has been a challenge for some venues, because being safe often requires investing in equipment, and owners have had to guess for well over a year about when the pandemic would lift enough for them to bring in revenue again.
“We all thought the pandemic was going to last about six weeks,” Bacon Madden said. “Then we thought all the health guidelines would still be in place and we were preparing for the worst. … Now all the protocols and guidelines are done, at least for now.”
Many venue owners and operators also weren’t expecting to go from an allowed capacity of 25% to 100% all at once, as happened when Ohio lifted its restrictions on gatherings on June 2.
“We were at 25% capacity, we thought maybe we’d go to 50% and then 75%, but all of a sudden … all of the restrictions were gone,” said Akron Civic Theatre’s Parr.
But that’s a happy challenge. Parr and other venue operators say they’re mostly just glad to be back to work and proud of the way people in their industry stuck together.
“We all, as an industry, worked together: the bands, the managers, the agents and the venues,” Parr said. “Nobody was a jerk.”
from WordPress https://ift.tt/3ATDGin
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment