On October 25th of last year it was announced that Matt Cook would be the new Artistic and Executive Director of the Sierra Madre Playhouse. This as the company’s home, once a furniture store and movie theater, is celebrating its 100th anniversary this weekend. What better way to bring much-needed exposure to the venue.

The scheduled events large revolve around great films by Harold Lloyd. His granddaughter, Suzanne Lloyd, is joining the celebrations. There is also a sold-out gala, The Bees Knees, which includes a 20s-themed party and access to all the films being shown. And if you haven’t seen Safety Last! you owe it to yourself to see one of the most exciting films ever made.

Cook joins the Sierra Madre Playhouse having been the Executive Director of Blue 13 Dance company and previously holding positions with Pacific Opera Project and Wild Up. Amongst the companies with which he has collaborated are Heidi Duckler Dance, Martha Graham Dance Company and Akron Khan company. He’s also a Grammy Award-winning performer.

Perhaps his biggest challenge is to find a way of making sure the Sierra Madre Playhouse makes it another 100 years and that people who live in Southern California who’ve never been to the playhouse, myself included, find out what they’re all about. Which is precisely where I started my conversation earlier this week with Cook.

What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

Q: When you came to the Sierra Madre Playhouse beginning September 1st of last year, had the 100th celebration already been in the works, or is this something that you came up with as a way of reintroducing the Sierra Madre Playhouse to people maybe like me, who had never been? 

The board is full of stakeholders that have been in the community for a very long time, some of them 30 years. So they had it on their radar to celebrate it in some way, but it hadn’t been formalized. So this is step one, this weekend, but then we’ll hope to have a big birthday party in the summer; try to celebrate all year. So I’m just a piece of the puzzle. 

This weekend is centered primarily on Harold Lloyd’s films. What made Harold Lloyd the right person to anchor this first leg of this centennial celebration? 

He was one of the biggest stars of 1924. This whole weekend are comedies from 1924 that were either made then or released then. He was an easy choice. Our curator of the weekend is Laura Gabrielle, who is a film historian. She got in touch with Harold Lloyd’s granddaughter, Suzanne Lloyd, so she’s going to be a big part of it as well. We’re honoring that era. He was one of the biggest stars. 

I read an interview that Suzanne Lloyd gave to Variety last year. She said the following about her grandfather. “He, in a lot of ways, was very much like the character he portrayed on screen. He had a lot of interest in life and people and what made them tick and what he could do to make things better. He liked to promote people from writers to directors, saying, ‘Go out and do your own thing. Go and do your own movie.'” It sounds like she’s discussing the job of an artistic director at a performing arts venue. Does that sound a little bit like your job as well as his perspective of what he did with his career?

Yeah, in ways it does. With the exception that I’m also trying to look outward to the community and not just have it be what I want to do, but what do we want to do. What can be the bridge to the community and the arts. So it’s a little bit of both.

When you’re in a big metropolis or part of a metropolis that includes Los Angeles, which is a cultural center in this country, how do you balance out what is the best thing to service the immediate community around you, versus what is the thing that maybe will get more people to pay attention to you? 

That is a balancing act. We’re in a unique position that we’ve been an institution for 100 years, but this year we’re trying something brand new. That idea came up before I got here, which is why they hired me to transition into a performing arts model. What I’m trying to do is provide world class artists at a very accessible price point. This whole year is a proof of concept. What does the community want? What do they need? So we’re listening. We’re asking a lot of artists, asking a lot of community members, and we’re trying to represent not just Sierra Madre, but now Los Angeles County. We’re really trying to be the regional performing arts center in East LA. There are venues like us, in downtown, the Music Center or the Broad on the West Side and [The Soraya] in Northridge, but there’s no true performing arts space in East LA.

Those venues have 500 seats or more. They can pay an artist, if they wanted to, $75,000 for the evening. That’s not going to be us, but we can still have a world class version. We could even have the same artists, but instead of their opera, we can produce their string quartet or something. We want to have the same quality, but in an intimate setting right now.

The Sierra Madre Playhouse had been a furniture store for 16 years before it became a theater. That sounds to me like the people owned that property were seeing the writing on the wall; there were changes happening that they wanted to take advantage of. That doesn’t seem totally apart and separate from what we’re facing now. What are the challenges for you in competing, not just with some of the arts institutions that you’ve you’ve mentioned, but for things like a smart phone which seems to be the way a lot of people choose to indulge in whatever their particular passions are?

How do you face that moving forward into the next hundred years? 

I think places for people gathering will always be needed and I think the human experience will always be needed. There is a vulnerability, I think, to live theater or live singing of music you can’t replicate on a device. So I think creating an experience is the next step. So it’s like having that as a baseline but then an experience. Maybe not just a recital, but something where the artists talk to the audience to include them in the process – something they can’t get on YouTube. That’s the next step. Then making it accessible. That’s not just price point, that’s genre. That’s also day of the week, time of day. Also marketing efforts to make sure that anyone that wants to be a part of it can be. So there are many factors, but I’m not so worried about that. I don’t think theater will die. I think that we just have to be reasonable. 

We’re in an environment where Center Theatre Group has all but abandoned any sense of a season at the Mark Taper Forum. They’ve got occasional events in there, but nothing formalized like we are all become accustomed to them having. That’s the smallest space at the Music Center. Does that bode well for you?

That’s true and it’s one of the best theaters in the world. But we’re unique in that our overhead is much lower. It costs them so much money to open. I’m not sure of their exact business model and how they filter the revenue and philanthropy. But I would imagine that they need to reduce the amount of work that they put forward. Perhaps they’re too busy or [there’s] too much overhead. But I feel like we’re actually in a really good spot and that over the next five years we’ll grow a lot and then probably plateau to a really comfortable midsize range.

I was talking to Thor Steingraber at The Soraya a couple weeks ago and he was talking frankly about seismic shifts that are going on in the performing arts. For instance, there’s very little, if any, culture covered in the L.A. Times. There used to be regular sections for that. That an institution like The Soraya is competing for advertising dollars not in print, but online. But they’re competing not with other performing arts organizations, they’re competing with Nike. They’re competing with these big monolithic corporations that individual performing arts venues just don’t have the budget to do. What do you see as the main task ahead of you in finding a way of carving out that space so that people know about the Sierra Madre Playhouse? 

I think finding something that is so special that relates to them; being the individual patron for that genre, that it will cut through the noise for them. I think finding something that resonates on a human level and then trying our best to find out what marketing strategies connect with them. You know, this is brand new for me getting to present and market 60 shows at one time. 

I think part of the point for me similar to Thor is that we’re not just an opera company, it’s a performing arts center. So we have many tools to reach the communities. There’s not just one audience that we’re marketing to.

As a performer/musician yourself you’ve experienced the highs and the lows that come with this line of work. What inspires you most at this point today about the best events to produce and the best way to present them?

Problem solving in general is fun for me. My whole life of practicing was all problem solving every day. You go and you try to get better. I think being flexible and remembering that the audience taste does come first, and that’s not at the sacrifice for what I think is good. I would never present something that I don’t like, but I think really listening and thinking about audience impact is important.

Throughout my career I’ve been in many different projects, all of which I’ve loved. Early in my career, some of them were very critically successful and got awards and things like that, but they had a hard time pulling an audience in our own city. So I had to reflect on that. I think learning from the experience of my peers.

There will always be a place for what we do if we keep the intentions in the right place. We’re not a bank. The goal is not to make money. If we just wanted to make money, you know, we could do Chicago 12 months a year and do a really high Broadway quality style thing. But I’m not even sure that that would sell that long.

One of the reasons some are thriving is because they are not doing things the way you’re supposedly supposed to do them. Pacific Opera Project did a production of Madame Butterfly, seeing that in Japanese and English made me realize that I now want to hear Carmen in Spanish instead of French. How much do you think that kind of thinking is what’s necessary today?

I think it’s essential. That’s not to say that there’s not a place for doing things how they’ve always done, but it should be a piece of a much larger puzzle. I think organizations like Pacific Opera Project are really creating the path for the future. They care about the audience and the art form. And there are a lot of problems of the art form. At a certain point you say, how do I fix them? They don’t have to be a library. All these performing arts organizations don’t have to just be a library. You don’t have to be Broadway. There is space in the middle.

Partnerships are at the root of what makes performing arts organizations really thrive. Through your career, we’ve already mentioned Pacific Opera Project, but you’ve been involved with Wild Up, with Martha Graham Dance, with Heidi Suckler and countless other organizations. Do you see opportunities to partner with these organizations as an opportunity for them to try out new work in a smaller, less eyes on them way or for them to do things that they can’t do as part of their regular seasons?

Absolutely. That is how a lot of this season already got booked. What I want to do is a lot more dance, which just takes longer to develop. One of the dance companies that I’m involved with is planning to do workshops. I can’t announce it yet. I can’t pay what The Soraya can pay for one night, but what we can do is offer space. We can offer community experiences in the space that they can bring students into workshop things. Certainly that’s on the table. I think that’s a very unique market position now as well. I control the building, I control the space. So until the money’s there, we can find different ways to partner and highlight voices that couldn’t otherwise get out there. 

You’re just at the beginning of celebrating the 100th anniversary. If you could foresee the Sierra Madre Playhouse of 2124 celebrating its 200th anniversary, what would you hope that anniversary would look like? What would you like your legacy to be as part of that anniversary?

I think an expanded audience, a more inclusive and diverse audience. That is also the genres they present. The Sierra Madre Playhouse is a welcoming space to be, regardless of who you are. I think that that would be a huge accomplishment, and I think it’ll happen. There are already so many community members that have been patrons and fans for 50 years that now their kids and their grandkids are patrons. I think it’s going to happen. It’s a unique spot in a unique community. I think it’s going to last. The building might change. I don’t know if the building will hold up another hundred years, but it’ll be there, I think.

To see the full interview with Matt Cook, please go here.

Main Photo: Matt Cook, Artistic and Executive Director of the Sierra Madre Playhouse (Courtesy Sierra Madre Playhouse)

The post Matt Cook Launches Sierra Madre Playhouse’s 100th Birthday appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Our government will soon announce plans bailing out the airline and travel industries. What you won’t hear them discuss, and it is highly unlikely they would even contemplate this, is support for the performing arts and the artists who create and perform. But we, who love the arts and know how much they enrich our lives, can.

Rather than ask for refunds for canceled performances, I’d urge you to consider donating the price of your ticket to the company that has had to outright cancel remaining or upcoming performances. (Many, but not all, such donations will be tax-deductible.)

Certainly longer-running shows will probably have the flexibility to offer you an exchange of tickets for another date. But what of something like Sweet Land by a small company like The Industry? A company that continually invests their assets into their next creative endeavor? Or CAP UCLA which just today announced the suspension of the rest of their 2019-2020 season?

Profits are not guaranteed in the arts. If you drive through town you’ll often see banners along the streets for LA Opera or Center Theatre Group or other performing arts organizations. Those banners are only available for non-profit companies. Even one as large as Center Theatre Group is a non-profit.

The federal government does very little to support plays, musicals, dance, music, artists etc… This isn’t Europe where the arts are supported by the government. In fact, America has a pretty lousy reputation for trying its best to not support the arts. In his most recent budget, Trump has suggested eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts – again!

As PBS says their programming is made possible by viewers like you. So are the performing arts. But ticket sales don’t cover all operating costs. Imagine what the cost of all these refunds would be not just in the short-term, but in the long-term.

And what of the actors, singers, dancers, musicians and more who make their livelihoods by sharing their talents with us?

Chances are that if you can afford a ticket to the opera, a play, the ballet, a concert or a musical, a certain percentage of your income is expendable. If it truly is expendable, and you value the arts as much as I do, I hope you’ll think twice about requesting a refund for a canceled performance.

In fact, while you’re thinking about that, perhaps a donation to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and/or The Actors Fund, can be added to your charitable donations to help performers who find themselves out of work. Why wait until December to make last-minute tax-deductible donations when those dollars can be put to very good use right now?

We are all going to make it through this crisis, but no one can predict how long this pandemic will last. The longer it goes on the closer we get to the point where companies large and small have to close or significantly scale back their programming. The end result is we will all be much poorer.

But when it is over, we will all be clamoring for the opportunity to share in the magic of live performance with one another as quickly as possible. So I ask, brothers (and sisters), can you spare your dimes?

Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt

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