Running Theaters: Best Practices for Leaders and Managers (review)

Duncan Webb is a veteran theatre management consultant, whose firm's extensive project list includes business plans and feasibility studies for the Florida Grand Opera, the Omaha Center for Performing Arts, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the City of Chicago. This experience has acquainted Webb with a large number of venue managers in North America, whose collective wisdom figures prominently in his book.

When Webb speaks of theatres, he means the public assembly spaces where events take place. For the purpose of the book, he defines a theatre as a venue "with multiple users, where there is a management organization . . . that activates . . . some combination of rentals, presented events, producing, and community programming" (x). Running Theaters therefore is not about organizing a company of performers, but about managing the buildings where they work. This facility-specific point of view is relatively under-explored in print; hence Running Theaters has become very popular among performing arts center managers since its publication. A comparatively short text, it provides a primer on facility operations while treating the usual arts management topics (marketing, fundraising, governance, strategic planning) through the lens of a building manager. In doing so, it fills an important niche in the literature of arts administration.

Webb sets out to write for a broad audience, including students, volunteers, and current theatre employees. The content of the book therefore starts from the ground up, with a thoughtful explanation of the job responsibilities that venue managers carry and the programmatic differences between presented events, produced events, and rental activity. Webb concisely describes what employees in the field know intuitively, and such readers will find value in seeing this knowledge writ for the first time. For those new to the world of performing arts center management, Running Theaters offers an eye-opening description of a complex industry. His chapters on the traditional topics mentioned above, despite their adequacy, do not contain the same freshness as the building-oriented sections; indeed, direct mail, planned giving, and board committee structure have received voluminous attention from other writers concerned with arts organizations. Nevertheless, a student audience will benefit from their inclusion.

Much to his credit, Webb gives special attention to two classes of performing arts venues that are omnipresent across North America: those located on college campuses, and those that have historic status within their communities. Both generally face extensive requirements that govern their usage, upkeep, and renovation—requirements that set them apart from other theatres and auditoria. University-based facilities must serve a variety of campus constituents and help to bridge gaps between the campus and the surrounding community, all the while waiting in line with other departments for the fulfillment of their fundraising goals and building improvement plans. Historic venues, the aged and popular landmarks found in many towns, bear the combined challenge of a dated physical plant and strong community opinion about their usage. They often require more maintenance resources than new buildings, and lack the amenities that today's artists and patrons expect from a performing arts venue. Stakeholder interest in such older theatres runs deeper, too; patrons who visited the facility as children, and then brought their own children to see events there, often have firm ideas about what changes to programming and to the building itself are acceptable. These layers of complication necessitate that venue managers possess the patience of Job and considerable political acumen.

In form, Webb's book consists of many, many excerpted interviews with performing arts facility managers. Hardly a page goes by without a quotation—often lengthy—from a professional in the field of venue administration. These quotations provide much of the value of Running Theaters, for they are laden with important information that can help any student or practitioner. Their presence throughout the book, however, defines its narrative style and leaves Webb with...