Fees will help improve facility at playhouse

The Bigfork Summer Playhouse has signed a 10-year lease for use of the Bigfork Center for the Performing Arts that enables the Playhouse theater program to continue but requires a $1-per-ticket fee for building maintenance.

Brach Thomson, associate producer, company manager and music director for the Playhouse, said there was “more tension than there should have been” in lease negotiations with the Bigfork Center for the Performing Arts Foundation, the nonprofit that owns the theater center.

The bottom line, he said, is that the Playhouse will go forward with its 57th season.

“We got through the negotiations and everybody, I think, made out OK,” Thomson said. “Negotiations are give some, take some. We understand they’re trying to run a business and so are we.

“The big picture is we don’t want anyone to worry. We’re days away from announcing our [summer] season” and auditions are moving forward as planned, he said.

The lease is for five years with the option of renewing the contract for an additional five years.

The $1 “theater enhancement and preservation fee” — which Thomson calls a tax — is required to cover the cost of maintaining and upgrading the center.

Other organizations that use the center began incorporating the $1-per-ticket fee into their pricing about three years ago, according to foundation board member Walter Kuhn.

“Anyone that sells tickets to an event or performance pays the $1 fee, including any event we may sponsor ourselves, such as the upcoming Valentine’s Day event,” Kuhn said. “The reason the Bigfork Summer Playhouse was previously exempt is because they were in the middle of their lease until this past October.”

The Playhouse’s expected contribution from the $1 fee, depending on ticket sales, is upwards of $20,000.

All of the rent and per-ticket fees collected by the foundation go directly back into the theater, Kuhn said. A new $1.1 million lobby was completed in 2009. More recent building improvements have included new stage lighting, a system for the hearing impaired and the addition of video projection equipment that could accommodate a film festival in the future.

The Bigfork Summer Playhouse pays a minimum of $35,000 a year to lease the center and that agreement will continue in the new lease. If ticket sales exceed that amount, the Playhouse pays a percentage on top of the $35,000.

Thomson, along with his parents and longtime Playhouse producers Don and Jude Thomson, had voiced concern about the lease agreement proposed by the foundation, largely because of the $1 fee.

“If my patrons feel like they want to make a donation to this building, I feel a donation is a free-will thing,” Brach Thomson said. “This is a forced donation. It’s a mandatory donation.”

If the Playhouse were to fill every seat in the 435-seat theater for every day of its 80-day season, the $1 fee would generate close to $35,000. Even though the summer plays don’t fill every seat every day, that’s why the Thomsons initially saw the new assessment as nearly doubling their financial requirement.

“Some of the initial miscue was that, oh, my God that’s double our rent,” Thomson said. “That’s where our math was.”

Kuhn said the foundation expects to bring in somewhere between $20,000 and $27,000 per year from all users of the center, depending on attendance.

“News that the Bigfork Summer Playhouse lease was up for renewal resulted in a lot of misinformation circulating in the community, which grew into rumors that the [foundation] was trying to force the [Playhouse] out of business by doubling the rent, limiting performances to just a few a week and that the Bigfork Center for the Performing Arts was not supportive of the Bigfork Summer Playhouse, which was false information,” the foundation stated in a press release issued Monday.

The foundation and Bigfork Summer Playhouse “have a unique relationship, which I view more as a partnership,” Kuhn said. “Both entities depend on the other for their existence; that is, without the Bigfork Summer Playhouse there would be no Bigfork Center for the Performing Arts,” and vice-versa.

“We all know the importance of the Bigfork Summer Playhouse to the cultural and economic well-being of Bigfork,” Kuhn added.

Don and Jude Thomson have been at the helm of the Playhouse since the mid-1960s and have grown the program from a small professional group into one of the Northwest’s most respected repertory theater companies. Brach has been a major part of the production staff for close to 20 years.