Stephen Klein, now in his second year as president of the Kentucky Center, carries a vast range of experience as an actor, teacher, orchestra manager and playhouse manager whose musical passions easily accommodate Joe Cocker and Placido Domingo, or Fiddler on the Roof and Tannhauser. His varied resume includes playing Caiaphas in Jesus Christ Superstar on Broadway and orchestral management posts with the Cleveland Orchestra, the Denver Symphony and for nine years as executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra in its glory days with Mstislav Rostropovich as conductor. More recently, he returned to his drama roots as managing director of the Pittsburgh Public Theater and as managing director of Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey.
His natural optimism appears to be undimmed by a year of facing the marketing challenges of enticing large numbers of people each night to the theaters operated by the Kentucky Center — the 2,400-seat Whitney, the 600-seat Bomhard and the 1,400-seat Brown Theatre on Broadway.
Thomson Smillie, who led Kentucky Opera for 16 years until 1997 and now writes on arts matters for Louisville Magazine, met with Klein for an exchange on the state of the performing arts and his goals for his current job.
Thomson Smillie: So basically it’s all about bums on seats?
Stephen Klein: A lot of it has to do with bottoms on seats, but there is more to it than that. I believe the Kentucky Center has a mission to make the best of the arts available to the largest number of people and that there is a spiritual component to that. There is an energy, an electricity generated when large numbers of people get together in one space to share a common experience, and that exchange of energy between stage and audience is a very
magical thing.
TS: Does Louisville have simply too many theaters? The Kentucky Center vying with the Palace while the lovely Brown Theatre on Broadway is underutilized?
SK: I think really no. The more activity there is, the better it is for the arts community. Like a shopping mall, where you have a couple of big department stores and many small ones to attract more activity. There are times when we have all theaters going and it is terrific for downtown. That is also why I am all for the arena being on Main Street — so that we have more activity downtown and people come to regard downtown as the arts/cultural hub of the city and region.
TS: Why do you think young people have largely turned their backs on the arts? An arts event is, nowadays, especially at the Whitney, the only place I can go to feel young again, strands of auburn amid a sea of gray.
SK: I think the root problem is that for most young people the arts are simply not relevant to them. I’m not sure why. One cause may be that they are not sufficiently introduced to the arts as children. I remember my parents dragging me to concerts at (Cleveland’s) Severance Hall — often reluctantly — 26 Thursdays a season, rain or shine.
TS: That has a ring of a sacred duty about it. Nowadays about the only thing people do on that regular a basis is go to church.
SK: Part of the challenge is that the old subscription matrix no longer works. People are not willing to make the commitment their parents made to pay in advance and plan for five nights at the ballet or a dozen operas spread over the season.
TS: Not to mention 26 Thursdays at Severance Hall. So how do you respond?
SK: One idea we are thinking of trying is a sampler, where you get to pick one opera, one ballet and a couple of concerts. I tried a sampler in Pittsburgh and it was not a success, and I think the reason was that we did not give the public the option of choosing. There are two ways of doing a sampler. One is for management to create packages of two concerts, one opera, one ballet and so on and offer them pre-packaged with no opportunity for the public to exchange between shows. The other is to let the public create their own selection. In Pittsburgh, management created the samplers; we won’t make that mistake here.
TS: There is no doubt young people are going out to things — just not your and my sort of things. I scan the pages of LEO and see around 60 musical happenings featuring artists I’ve never heard of. Events perhaps.
SK: Yes. For them it is the complete experience that attracts — the ambience, meeting their friends, being among a peer group. Actors Theatre does this very well with its Generation One program, formerly the Development Board, which aims to increase the involvement of young people through parties, meet-the-cast events and socializing around the performance. I had success with the "complete-evening concept" at Pittsburgh Public Theater — a free party before and a chance to meet and chat with the artists after.
TS: I was surprised to hear some young people say recently that the cinema is not really their thing. They are just not into sitting and having the entertainment fed to them. They want commitment and involvement.
SK: There is nothing new in that. I am old enough to remember Beatlemania, when young people sang and shouted and jumped up on their seats, and not quite old enough to remember the hysteria generated by Frank Sinatra. You are right that young people are not satisfied to sit still and be fed their entertainment; the change in recent years is that older people now take the same approach. The model where large numbers of the middle class would sit dutifully and just listen to a symphony concert is over.
TS: You have a special challenge attracting African-American audiences. Louisville is the most segregated city I have ever experienced. I was in Johannesburg last year and a fair proportion of the guests at events I attended were black and half the servers at parties were white. Here all the people sitting down at dinner parties are white and all the ones standing up are black. I find a similar apartheid in the arts.
SK: It’s not just something that occurs in Louisville. It happens in a lot of other major cities. Audiences will att/files/storyimages/and respond if there is something they can relate to. If you engage Jessye Norman, Kathy Battle or Wynton Marsalis you will have more of an African-American audience. We just had a sellout experience with India.Arie at the Brown Theatre, an African-American artist performing mainly for an African-American audience.
TS: I think there is an awful danger in believing our own press releases. We talk about Louisville as a world-class arts city, but the truth is that, a few events apart, the product can be pretty ordinary. Do you agree?
SK: No, I don’t. I have been incredibly impressed by things I have seen both at the Louisville Ballet and at Kentucky Opera. The Eugene Onegin last season was a masterly production of a very complex and difficult work. A gutsy decision to do a tough work in Russian paid off.
TS: What are we to make of a situation when our 71-piece Louisville Orchestra gives a concert in the massive spaces of the Whitney and outnumbers the audience?
SK: There is no doubt the Louisville Orchestra, like other groups, has marketing challenges ahead. But so does every orchestra in the world. One encouraging sign is that the Louisville Orchestra and Brad Broecker (interim general manager) have some radical programming ideas to address the challenges. I’ll let them tell you about them, but they’re … radical. (See pages 26 and 40) for more on the orchestra’s upcoming season.)
TS: With $500,000 of Rockefeller money in the 1950s, Robert Whitney really placed the Louisville Orchestra on the musical map, internationally as much as, or more than, locally. Could you see a scheme like that succeeding today?
SK: I doubt it. When I was with National Symphony we, or rather Rostropovich, commissioned major scores from many of the greatest living composers — and a couple of dead ones as well — and we received international acclaim for that. Much more international praise than either national or local acclaim, I might add.
One outstanding difference between then and now is that 40 years ago every young person learned a musical instrument and played it, however badly.
TS: What was yours?
SK: I played the clarinet in the school orchestra and would have continued to do so had I not broken my front teeth playing football.
TS: You have had an amazingly varied career.
SK: I can’t hold a job.
TS: Not quite true — some you held for years, including a decade with the National Symphony in Washington. One strand we have in common is that we both worked for the legendary and now deceased Sarah Caldwell, who was the creator and amazingly erratic director of the Opera Company of Boston.
SK: I was a student at Boston University and I worked for Sarah Caldwell on her production of Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron.
TS: Cast as the Naked Hebrew Youth, possibly?
SK: No, better still. I had the job of putting the gold paint on all the ballerinas’ bodies.
TS: Would you describe the audiences here as conservative?
SK: Not entirely. Louisville has built an amazing reputation on the basis of new work. I knew about the Louisville Orchestra growing up in Cleveland through Robert Whitney and his commissioning scheme, and the Humana Festival (of New American Plays) has been an international success and raised the bar for American theater. . . . It is a challenge for any artistic director constantly to produce work that is fresh and interesting, that the public will like and that allows you to look yourself in the face the morning after you make the decision.
TS: I think there is a sense that Whitney Hall is too large. It is very hard for the Louisville Orchestra to achieve a true fortissimo, and for opera, it is too big for all but the biggest voices.
SK: That’s simply not true. It is not large by national standards — most of America’s performance halls are as big or much bigger.
TS: The average European concert or opera hall is around the size of the Brown Theatre.
SK: Many of our auditoriums were built at a time of expansion in the arts — during the ’60s through the ’80s when audiences were booming. Another factor is that (U.S.) arts organizations rely far more heavily on box office than do their subsidized European colleagues. Though in support of your point I notice that many of the new theaters going up now — like Atlanta and the one planned for Cincinnati — are smaller, a reflection perhaps of the new realities in marketing the arts. Audiences for the classical arts are shrinking; those for popular culture are not.
TS: It is a huge undertaking simply to keep this building going — a staff of over 100, maintenance and upkeep, exacerbated I suppose by the fact that the Center is "dark" almost all summer.
SK: Not entirely — we had great success this summer bringing in "name" acts that came close to filling the place: Willie Nelson, Bill Maher and Tom Jones. People said you could not get an audience in Louisville, Kentucky, in July, and we did.
TS: There is another side to the role of the Center, and one which I think you are reviving. That is what I might call "the theater as village green." I was delighted to see in the lobby today young artists — potters and painters, mainly — displaying some really lovely stuff.
SK: That’s Studio 2000: The young people make the work in the summer and auction and sell it in the lobby. This is in addition to the revolving shows we tie into the monthly Gallery Hop.
We are looking into making the lobby Wi-Fi. We noticed that people were visiting the lobby with laptops, and the idea of making it a place where downtown people can come, shelter from the elements and commune with the internet is a promising one.
Another big success of the summer months, and one that has given me great happiness and sense of achievement, has been the Governor’s School for the Arts. This is a program that brings young people from around the state to Louisville — to the Kentucky Center, the state theater of Kentucky — and brings outstanding faculty from all over the country to offer an immersion for young artists in their chosen field, be it guitar, dance, song, whatever.
Each of these young people has to audition — by the time they arrive here they are already winners — and over the course of the summer they form this terrific bond with their teachers and with one another. I was close to tears watching them leave, in many cases returning to a rural location where they might be the only person for miles around with this special thing, a love for and a distinction in the arts.
TS: I think an equally clever scheme is the Gheens Young Artists Program, which is in my view a very good idea properly executed.
SK: I agree; like the Governor’s School, I inherited it and I think it was partly the idea of the people over at Gheens, especially Morton Boyd, with a lot of creative input from Allan Cowen. The idea is to take young artists of promise and achievement and offer them a showcase.
And the concerts are only part of it — more, or at least as, important is that the young artists go out into schools and work with musicians not much younger than themselves. They serve as role models.
TS: Still on the youth front: Some years ago, the Kentucky Center did a management buyout of Stage One. Has that been a success?
SK: Artistically, it has been a success. One of the financial challenges is that we are charging exactly the same ticket fee now as we did in 1993. If we had raised the price by $1 over that period, there would be no financial issue. But we have tried to keep Stage One prices in line with all the other competing attractions in that schools market.
TS: Are you happy in your work?
SK: I am loving it here. It is a wonderful community and a wonderful arts community. You asked me earlier what my brief was, and I suppose it is to maintain quality while increasing the number of people going through the Center. The number of butts on seats.
TS: Bottoms on seats.
SK: I sit corrected.
