Discovering How to ‘Dress’ for Success

The Laguna Playhouse’s experiment worked. Its first summer show in 12 years at the Moulton Theater, combined with an earlier run in January, has grossed more at the box office--nearly $500,000--than any production in the company’s 77-year history.

“It’s been amazing, better than anything any of us could have expected,” the playhouse’s executive director, Richard Stein, said Monday.

“Don’t Dress for Dinner,” which closed Sunday after a six-week reprise, grossed $232,405 and drew 7,711 paid attendees--80% of capacity at the 420-seat Moulton--for 23 nonsubscription performances. During the subscription season, it grossed $260,113 and drew 11,357 paying playgoers for 31 performances from Jan. 2 to Feb. 2--87% attendance.

The French sex farce with a British accent, a critical and commercial success, had the same cast for both runs and was directed by playhouse Artistic Director Andrew Barnicle, who also designed the set.

“Don’t Dress for Dinner” took in a combined total of $492,518 and played to 19,068 paying theatergoers for 54 performances, averaging 84% paid attendance overall. That far surpasses the previous record of $271,785 set by the musical “Oliver!” in December 1993 for 40 performances attended by 14,246 paying show-goers--or 85% of total capacity.

The new record is all the more impressive because the entire run of “Oliver!” had two built-in subscription audiences, season ticket-holders to the regular main stage season and to the Youth Theatre season. It sold 4,624 single tickets, less than half the number sold for “Don’t Dress for Dinner.”

“We felt there was a high degree of risk because we’ve been invisible during the summer, especially to the thousands of tourists who come here,” Stein said. “They don’t have the habit of seeing shows here at this time of year. So we knew going in that to make it work we had to put up something with broad appeal. We felt this was the right candidate because it had been so popular during the winter run that we’d had to turn away hundreds of people.”

Competition from the customary summer festivals in this seaside resort--the Festival of Arts, the Pageant of the Masters, the Sawdust Festival and the Art-a-Fair--which causes a crush of traffic and a huge parking challenge, also work against a summer show at the Moulton, Stein said.

The success of “Don’t Dress for Dinner” has spilled over into subscription sales. Stein noted: “We’re finding that many first-time theatergoers, who were previously unaware of our existence because we’d been dark at this time of year, are signing up for next season.”

Stein said the playhouse is averaging 50 to 100 new subscriptions daily. The playhouse has already reached its projected goal of 6,600 season ticket-holders to the five plays on the 1997-98 schedule.

“We’ve met our projection a month early,” Stein said, “and if the calls keep coming at the rate they’re going, we may well have more than 8,000 subscribers next season.”

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The playhouse had a record number of about 8,800 subscribers during the 1992-93 season. That fell at roughly a 10% rate each year through last season, when the playhouse had 6,600 subscribers. Stein said the reasons for the decline, more than compensated for by single-ticket sales, largely had to do with the economic recession and more varied programming than subscribers had been used to getting.

“We focused our marketing strategy on single-ticket sales in those years,” he said. “They became an indicator of our audience’s changing demographics. The audience is younger and more willing to take a chance on less homogenous programming. They want to sample different kinds of fare rather than have a similar aesthetic experience each time.”

Southern California’s apparent economic turnaround has contributed mightily to the uptick in subscriptions, as has the playhouse’s vigorous summer marketing, Stein said. The playhouse spent $30,000 in media ads for “Don’t Dress for Dinner,” also a record, much of it focused in Los Angeles as well as Orange County.

“It was an expensive campaign for us,” he said, “but it certainly paid off. A substantial number of people came back to see the show a second time, at least 1,000 subscribers from last season. And we’ve had hundreds of people from Los Angeles who’d never seen a show here before.”

The success also may have had casting repercussions. Two actors from South Coast Repertory will star for the first time in the playhouse’s season opener, “Travels With My Aunt,” in September.

Ron Boussom, one of SCR’s founding artists, and Howard Shangraw, another actor often seen at the Costa Mesa theater, have been cast with Laguna Playhouse regular Tom Shelton under Stein’s direction in Giles Havergal’s adaptation of the Graham Greene novel of the same name.