The Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville at age 16 is being called a relic in some (moneyed) quarters. Those quarters know it’s not old by civic center standards, and in the last year or so it got reupholstered. The quarrel is its size. The main auditorium has about 1,200 seats, and we’re a growing metropolis, aren’t we, never mind the stagnant building-building industry here as elsewhere?
The center’s governing body, the Board of WAC-kies, thinks the area’s principal performance facility should be twice as big, holding 2,500 seats. There’s a handful of convention sites, municipal and hotel-based, that can hold at least that number of stacking or folding chairs, but thankfully the WAC-kies want relatively fixed seats and a permanent stage for ideal visuals and acoustics for music, drama and dance.
(The main WAC has a second stage, a flexible black-box sort, and a gallery. A block away its annex, the Nadine Baum Studios, was custom-built a few years later for art studio-class space including kilns, as well as the center’s third performance space. The Nadine Baum seems to be nowhere on the WAC site; it remains, however, the home of the Theatre Squared drama company.)
The WAC management has so mastered dance itself it rarely directly states anything. They don’t quite pull out Tchaikovsky’s 1812 cannon but the news media does state the WAC is threatening to move, both for a bigger building and, probably, financial incentives for wherever it lands, including away from Fayetteville.
The news articles thus far have given only bare bones on the WAC’s original charter. Reportedly, the city and the University of Arkansas paid for its construction but budgeted nothing for its operations over the years. UA productions — orchestral, band, choral and operatic — have some kind of priority in their bookings and a discounted rental rate, I’ve heard. Does that end if the WAC moves, or does the UA move with it?
Of course Fayetteville officials want the WAC to stay, and if it needs a bigger building then that should be in Fayetteville. The strong argument is Fayetteville is Northwest Arkansas’ cultural center and as the college town will remain so. The main counter-argument is the population, particularly the executive population that buys most such tickets, lives and works in the Wal-Mart Headquarters parking lot, aka Bentonville.
The arguments are even, but here is one element still unexplored, at least publicly.
An area auditorium has a business obligation, not to make a profit so much but to “be lit,” as Broadway types say. How many nights a year will a cavernous 2,500-seat auditorium be rented?
It is thrilling to be in the WAC when our own North Arkansas Symphony is giving a sold-out concert, which is often the case. Yes, it just might fill twice the size just as easily. But the WAC offers many shows through the year that don’t sell that well. There were dozens of empty seats at last fall’s Lucinda Williams concert. She’s a Grammy winner, a hometown favorite, and her opening act was the C&W pioneer Charlie Louvin. Yes, bad nights happen out of luck, but the real reason lies in experienced ticket-pricing and marketing strategies (or their lack).
The WAC-kies claim that comparable metro areas have larger auditoriums, but they have not said how often they get rented and when they do how tickets sell. Why does this occur to me? My late father was heavily involved at the building of the Fort Smith Municipal Auditorium in the 1960s and managed it for a time in the 1970s. I heard such talk at the dinner table. That building by the way was replaced in recent years.
I do have a proposal.
The Fayetteville City Council should buy the existing building and run it, like Fort Smith and scores of other cities. It can get some funding from UA and from the Fayetteville School District in exchange for using the property. Fayetteville High can use the space for plays and concerts, reclaiming its on-campus auditorium for needed classroom space.
A 1,200-seat facility on Dickson Street, if professionally managed, will remain continuously rented and not drain taxpayer money. Cut the WAC loose.
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