In the days before January’s winter storm that shut down Memphis for two weeks, the classic opera “The Barber of Seville” was in final rehearsals at the University of Memphis’ Scheidt Center.
“It’s a piece that is all about laughter,” said Ned Canty, executive director of Opera Memphis. “It’s about joy. It’s about happy endings.”
But a happy ending wasn’t in this production’s future. Despite strong box office sales ahead of the opening, “that whole week all anybody was talking about was the snow-pocalypse that was coming,” said Canty.
Winter Storm Fern would be a multi-billion dollar disaster for the United States. But ahead of its arrival, forecasters weren’t exactly sure when the worst would hit. For most performing arts groups, snow days aren’t nearly as frozen in place as show days. There was no rescheduling.
“The complexities, especially with the symphony, with the venue, we had singers coming in from all over, as well as the local singers…” he said. “Finding a time when all of those things would intersect again was just really not it just wasn't possible.”
Friday’s pre-storm opening and Saturday’s total cancellation, meant that only about 1,000 tickets were sold -- 800 fewer than expected. About half the revenue was lost on a production that cost between $300,000 and $400,000 dollars to stage.
“It’s a tough year for a lot of us in the arts,” he says of a year that already started with huge cuts to federal grants. “So we already had a bit of a hole that was punched in our budget that we've been trying to make up.”
Canty says losing a moneymaking event to snow and ice is just one more challenge for arts groups still struggling with the effects of another big disaster: the pandemic. Six years later, attendance has yet to fully recover.
“These days, you know, the effort it takes to get anybody out of the house at all is so much greater than the gravitational pull that sofas have been exerting ever since the pandemic,” he said.
That same January week, the Orpheum Theater’s Bret Batterson had also been watching the forecast, but with the eyes of a Chicago transplant. In his 40 years in the business, he’d never had to cancel a show because of weather.
“This is the first time ever in my whole career that I've had to actually invoke a force majeure clause in a contract,” he said.
That’s the so-called “Acts of God” clause. And when the cast of the national tour of “The Outsiders” performed to just 156 people at Saturday’s matinee, it was time to call it. Cancelling the last three shows came at a cost.
“I would say it's in the ballpark of a quarter of a million dollars,” he said. “The actual number of tickets we refunded were a lot more than that.”
As any Chicagoan can attest, Memphis is not a winter weather town. And in the weeks after, the city turned its attention to the future. Do we buy more snow plows? De-ice more roads? How much should the city invest in dealing with a couple of weeks -- or more typically a few days -- of snow and ice.
If those days happen to fall on a weekend, Ned Canty says all arts groups can really only look to the future.
“You just have to work on getting them in the door the next time around,” he said.
For both Opera Memphis and the Orpheum, the future is now.
This weekend, a time machine offers a do-over on stage in the Orpheum’s “Back to the Future: the Musical.” And Opera Memphis opens the world-premiere of “Pretty Little Room” at Crosstown Theater.
The silver lining, they hope, is that audiences, too, are ready to put the past on ice.
