Encore! | The Children's Theatre of Maine returns to the stage thanks to a new partnership
Any grown-up will tell you art needs a little business savvy to put food on the table.
By 2006, after 80 years of blazing creativity, a series of uninspired business decisions left the oldest continual kids' theater in the country with little more than the wisdom of that age-old admonition. The Children's Theatre of Maine, founded in Portland in 1923, was struggling for attention in Portland's Bayside neighborhood, a part of town known more for warehouses than art, and buckling under a poorly planned budget that included a monthly rent of roughly $7,000, a staff of four full- and two part-time employees, two annual touring shows, a summer camp, theater workshops, four to six in-house shows and a few paid adult actors.
According to Michael Bourque, who since October 2006 has chaired the theater's 10-member board, the annual budget when he took over had ballooned to $450,000. The theater had maxed out a $30,000 line of credit and had roughly $50,000 in unpaid bills. And only about 40% of its revenue came from ticket sales. To thicken the plot, the theater relied heavily on one donor for the remaining funds. Two administrators, including the business manager, resigned that year because the theater's finances were so tenuous.
Bourque, the vice president of corporate marketing and communications at the Portland insurance company MEMIC, realized the theater would have to go back to act one, scene one, or risk facing its final curtain call.
And so, last October, the Children's Theatre of Maine went on hiatus. It canceled its production schedule, moved out of the Marginal Way space and laid off its remaining staff. "We had very little choice," Bourque says. "The other option would have been to continue what we were doing and become insolvent."
During the intermission, Bourque and the board scoured the Portland area for a nonprofit to partner with — one that would lighten the bills with administrative assistance and an inexpensive performance space. In March, Bourque found the theater's soulmate — the Children's Museum of Maine.
In August, the two nonprofits announced a partnership and the theater moved into the basement level of the Portland museum at a rent Bourque says will amount to a quarter or less of the Marginal Way rent. The nonprofit has discontinued all of its programming besides the six or so shows it plans to produce in the museum space during the next year. No more summer camp, no more traveling troupe, no more educational workshops. The budget? $70,000. It's an amount, Bourque says, that is "entirely doable."
The theater will use the museum's marketing, administrative and accounting services on an as-needed basis, paid by the hour, and the projected savings have freed up enough money to hire part-time artistic and managing directors. In October, the theater will launch an annual fundraising campaign and Bourque hopes, in a state bursting with nonprofits clamoring for limited funds, the museum affiliation will give his nonprofit an edge.
"The one thing you hear from every donor or fundraiser is that there are too many nonprofits and they need to find ways to work together and collaborate," he explains. "To me, that makes sense in the same way that in business you find ways to capitalize on more with less."
The theater's October show will be its first in the new museum space — a bright classroom with a linoleum floor, two plywood stages and four small spotlights. The play is an interpretation of Homer's The Odyssey if Odysseus were a pirate. During a recent afternoon, Bourque sat in the classroom-turned-theater while around him exploded the giddy frenzy of costumed kids. "From a business standpoint," Bourque said, "it means we can begin to execute our mission again."
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