Programming and Production Interview

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We sat down in October with the people responsible for booking Wolf Trap’s shows in the Filene Center and The Barns —Ann McKee, Barbara Parker, Kim Witman, and Peter Zimmerman—to find out what it takes to bring magic to our stages. Turns out, they have to perform a bit of magic themselves…

How do you actually book an act?

Ann: It totally depends…some of them come to us and pursue us relentlessly. Artists or agents and managers always believe their artists can sell out— no problem at all. We form a collaborative relationship with any number of agencies and regional reps that are responsible for our area and either we call them, or they call us to go over everybody on their roster that’s going on tour this year.

Then there’s this other range of people who need to be pursued, need to be courted to convince them that they’re wanted. There are people who we pursue that don’t agree for a very, very long time until we finally get them to come to the Filene Center. And some people are just creatures of habit and only perform in certain other venues — always have, always will.

Peter: A good example of what Ann described about us pursuing would be James Taylor – we’ve been trying for years to get him to come here and this past summer was a success story. Another example would be Jackson Brown; we keep trying to lure him here. I’d say 90% of the stuff I’m working on fits the model Ann described—whether artists for the Filene Center or the Barns, 90% of the way we get people is going through agents, not managers or the artists themselves.

Ann: There are a lot of fishing expeditions, where the agent will call and say, “What do you think about Crosby Stills and Nash?” and you go in a heartbeat! They’re looking to see whether they can string together enough venues to appeal to the artist to come out for another summer tour.

Barbara: We have a little bit more loyalty in the dance world and long-term relationships with the companies. It’s understood that before they went to any other venue, they would call and say: “We’ve got this offer from X festival, would it be okay with you…?” to which the response would be either: I’m not going to book you next year, so you can go there next year, or no, that’s not OK because I’m going to book you and need you to stay out of the market until then. Because it’s not about how much more money they can make at another venue, they’ll do what they can to maintain their relationship with us.

Ann: There are a lot of artists who are fiercely loyal to us, who in spite of the fact that they could make more money elsewhere believe Wolf Trap is the right place for them.

Peter: And more and more they want to be in the right place because the concert industry right now is experiencing, not a downturn, but…it’s not as easy as it used to be for an artist to go out and play anywhere they want and have a successful tour. So the loyalty does come into play.

The other 10% of shows, particularly for The Barns, don’t go through agencies, but are done with an artist directly, or the manager – Julie Murphy Wells or Chuck Brown, for example.

Why might a particular artist not perform at Wolf Trap?

Peter: Economically, it’s just not the right fit for the artist or for Wolf Trap. Take Toby Keith, for example. He plays at Nissan and sells 25,000 tickets in one day – we have 7,000 seats. So as an artist’s manager, what would you do? Play a week at Wolf Trap or one night at Nissan in order to make the money that he can command.

All artists live in this fickle world, and often we say we catch them on the way up and then after they are no longer arena acts. So, Randy Travis or Huey Lewis or Chris Isaak are very happy to play here, but it wasn’t the right choice for them at some point. And there are certain acts – Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Billy Joel, Elton John…

Ann: And we just flat out can’t afford them. Some of these acts are charging $250, $300 per ticket…and there have been a number of people who’ve been associated with us for a long time who say: “Well, just charge whatever you need – I’m sure you could get it.” But that’s not who we are…Wolf Trap’s not about how much we can get at the box office.

We sometimes make artistic choices that do not and cannot make money—symphony, dance, opera, sometimes musicals, sometimes world music shows—their very nature is that they cost more than you would reasonably charge a Wolf Trap patron. But we do those because we think it’s the right thing for us to do.

Barbara: People also ask, “Why isn’t this group coming this summer?” If they don’t have a summer tour planned, Peter can’t talk them into launching one. There are people who take the summer off because they want to take the summer off. If the Moody Blues aren’t coming to the US…there’s no point in calling them.

Peter: Yeah, Tom Jones wasn’t working last summer, so we couldn’t get him to come. So, logistics do play a major role putting someone on the season or not being on the season calendar. Tours all need to be contiguously routed between non-overdrive lengths, especially now with fuel prices. And within a leg of their northeast tour, there’s going to be a two week window—another reason why we might get somebody. We might have the first two weeks of July booked solid by the time the band Train comes to us and says, “Can we have anything between July 10th and 15th?” And we say – we’re done, I don’t have anything there. And that’s the only time that they can be here.

Ann: It may have been different 20 years ago when artists would show up at your door with their guitar, keyboard, whatever. But now it’s a whole entourage – it’s their production folks and their band and their band gear and their back-up singers and dancers – all bringing truckloads, and truckloads of scenery, sound, and lights.

How do you manage to squeeze 90+ shows into roughly 110 days?

Ann: That’s the biggest juggling act! It’s trying to keep as much open as long as you possibly can…and not letting the balls land until you absolutely have to. Because the last thing in the world that you want to happen is to book somebody local—a great act, but one who says “any time during the summer is fine with me”—you book them solidly and then along comes the James Taylor, who you’ve been courting for 20 years, and the one and only date he can do is the one you’ve just given up to someone who can come any time. So, we’re talking to a hundred people at any given time. The calendar at any given time will sometimes have first, second, and third holds on every single day.

Peter: And then you get the artists fighting over that day. They can challenge an artist who is ahead of them. Let’s say Trisha Yearwood is the first hold, and Mary Chapin Carpenter is the second. If the second hold says I’m ready to confirm, they can challenge the first hold. Mary Chapin can challenge Trisha even though they don’t know who the other artist is. So the first artist has 48 hours to confirm.

Ann: When they’ve got us on hold, we have them on hold, and they don’t want to confirm with us until everything else works out for them. And we don’t want to confirm with them until we know there isn’t something else that we want on that day.

Peter: I just tried to confirm a show late last night so we could put it on sale to donors and then the general public on November 21 But they didn’t want to say we’re playing Wolf Trap on such and such a day—they wanted to wait until their whole tour was confirmed and in place.

Kim: Our relationship with National Symphony is a partnership. The NSO actually books the symphony guest artists. Because of our partnership with them, we participate in choosing the artists, but they are the ones doing the actual negotiations. So we’re one step removed, but it’s not that dissimilar a process.

Ann: We actually started in July sitting down with the Symphony and talking about what had and hadn’t happened the previous year that we were hoping might happen in 2009 or 2010…OK, do we want to do a choral thing, a couple of film projects? Everything we do out here with them is collaborative…and with the whole process, we’re also bumping into the fact that they’ve got an entire season, fall, winter, spring and into the summer at the Kennedy Center….and we don’t know who they are scheduling for that.

Barbara: And they’re making sure that what is presented isn’t the same thing summer after summer.

Ann: We still get mail every year—either in a positive way or a negative way—from people who think that some things have been here every year. People who will say, Why do you always do the same thing? Which is just flat out not true…huge proportions of things change every year. But we also get mail from people who say why aren’t you doing Bugs Bunny again this year?

How many debut artist to you book per season?

Peter: Some years up to 25% - sometimes artists are here for the first time and then we never see them again, and some decide they like it and keep coming back. Some people say: oh you do the Doobie Brothers every year…or other acts who now are perceived as “Oh, you do them all the time…”

Ann: And often it hasn’t been that long since the first time they were here. John Denver was one years and years ago that we pursued for 10-15 years before we finally lured him here, and once he was here, he was here to stay: he loved the venue, he loved the environment, the patrons, the way he was treated backstage, everything. With any luck, some of the people we’ve had for the first time in recent years will keep coming and coming.

Peter: We’re being pursued all the time by agents to get somebody here for the first time…

Ann: We’ve got countless ones that we had as first time artists and couldn’t sell a ticket. The first time Harry Connick Jr. was here, or Vince Gill, Dixie Chicks, Lyle Lovett—lots of people like that who first appeared in The Barns when nobody knew who they were. Reba McIntyre was one of them we got before she was anyone, and then she grew into a 20-truck tour.

Is it hard to book such a wide variety of acts?

Ann: One of the biggest issues is that we’re creating so many things in such a short period of time and trying to have as few dark days as possible. So yes, trying to stay on top of so many different acts and guessing what people are going to care about…. Our track record is mighty fine, but sometimes you think something is so wonderful, but then nobody came.

Barbara: We have the advantage that everyone who books has a broad knowledge of everything that we do here, but then everyone also has a specific knowledge of their area of expertise. There aren’t a lot of places where you have someone who just does dance; the same person who’s booking dance at WPAS is also booking world music. As small a department as we are, we really know lots of stuff.

Ann: The timing is really different depending on the genre. Right now, Barbara and I are already through some things that are here because the musical and dance have to be booked further out. Opera is booked later after the auditions tour, and chamber music is already going forward for 2009-2010. The larger things tend to be booked a lot further out. In fact I’ve had a number of conversations with agents that so and so is not going to happen this summer, or aren’t available this summer, or they aren’t going to be on the road until….

What do you have to do to create a contract with an artist? And what are some of the more unusual contract requirements you have come across?

Ann: As far as the financials are concerned, that’s all proprietary information and we’re not allowed to say. But believe me— we’ve had people say, “Oh c’mon, you can tell me…what does so-and-so actually cost?” And you have to sort of tell people: you do the math. We’ve got a roughly 7,000 seat hall and you know what tickets cost: you figure out what the gross potential is and then realize that the artist takes most of it with them.

We have to cover advertising costs, marketing costs, which are extraordinarily expensive for this market; stage hands; the care and feeding of the artists – breakfast, lunch, dinner, bus food, dressing room food, all that sort of stuff. So, our house costs are quiet expensive.

I was talking to someone this morning who was looking for a fee for an artist who we would very much like to have, who would do extraordinarily well here, but the fee plus an orchestra, plus video equipment is beyond our means without tripling the ticket price, and that’s not what we’re about.

Barbara: We’re very proud of being one of the early presenters to take our contracting green. We used to produce eight to ten copies of these very thick contracts, plus send them FedEx around the country. Now it’s all done electronically.
Kim: Some things are put in contracts just to see if you have read it. If it doesn’t come back crossed out, they’ll know we haven’t read it enough to know that they’ve asked for stuff that no one will give them.

Barbara: We have fun with it, too. Ben Folds’ contract says that there has to be a representative who’s able to answer any question at any time and if they don’t have the answer, they lose playground privileges. We change it…maybe we’ll leave the playground privileges in and change their catering to a cup of coffee…to let them know, yeah, we are reading what you are writing.

Ann: Over time however, we’ve been asked for mini golf, ping pong tables, Pacman machines in their hotel room. We had an artist one year who wanted all of their hors d’oeuvres to be served on sterling silver platters…it went further to defining the cheese puffs were to be on an 8 inch square platter and so on. We ended up crossing it all out, and this artist ended up traveling with a full silver service. We have stories of 5 pounds of M&Ms, with no brown ones—that’s true.

We drew the line a number of years ago when people started asking for socks and boxer shorts. We just couldn’t figure out what the heck that was all about, but then we found out it’s for the tech people. They could wear the same pair of jeans day after day, but not the same socks or boxers. So, if they got new ones at every stop as they rode down the highway, they wouldn’t have to do laundry. We still don’t provide those.

What makes a great season for you? When you look at the calendar, how do you know that you’ve done well?

Peter: When we lay out the season calendar for the first time, we often point to a week and say, “Look at that week! There are seven shows from Monday to Sunday – there’s a country, blues, symphony”…there are seven completely different genres over a seven-day period.

Ann: For me, it’s the level of excitement I see from people…in line on box office opening day, their faces as they come in the gates for shows throughout the season. And based on that alone, we’ve had a lot of great seasons!