It was supposed to have been Theatre Baton Rouge’s seventh theatrical work of the season. But the schmaltzy, upbeat roller-skate musical Xanadu, which takes the stage tonight for its third and final weekend, will now be TBR’s last play or musical ever.
On March 1—six days before Xanadu’s opening night—TBR’s board of governors announced the organization’s sudden closure on social media. The local theater nonprofit would neither stage this season’s last two shows, the Tennessee Williams favorite Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and the beloved musical Fiddler on the Roof, nor would it reach a landmark 80th season this fall.
Immediately following the announcement, hundreds of comments flooded TBR’s Facebook and Instagram pages from legions of gutted fans, including past performers, patrons and volunteers. It didn’t matter that one of Baton Rouge’s biggest distractions, the Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade, was happening at the same time. The outcry was swift. “Such a big loss for Baton Rouge,” “heartbreaking on so many levels,” “no words,” the posters lamented. And: “Why are we letting this happen?”
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225 spoke with eight sources within the organization and the Capital Region performing arts community, as well as national experts. (Several others did not return requests for comment.)
Whether or not other local arts nonprofits could step in and pick up some of the stalwart organization’s programming hasn’t been announced, but theater advocates were meeting with TBR’s board this week to discuss options.
Open since 1946, TBR is one of the oldest community theaters in the country. It’s been a hub for Baton Rouge’s live performing arts scene for almost eight decades, drawing thousands to its Main Stage and smaller Studio Theatre for a nearly year-round slate of shows that span sweeping musicals, holiday classics, socially conscious plays and popular youth productions. TBR’s renditions of iconic works like A Christmas Carol and The Rocky Horror Show were annual rituals for many fans.
The board cited post-pandemic financial hardship as the main reason for closing, pointing to a continuing decline in ticket sales, soaring production costs, debt, and building and equipment maintenance.
“We really were struggling from COVID and beyond to kind of regain our footing,” says Andrea Tettleton, who joined TBR’s volunteer board of governors last August and stepped into the board presidency just days before the announcement. “We just haven’t been able to locate that financial support in the way that we had hoped.”
But to many, the timing was abrupt.
“I was devastated. Theatre Baton Rouge has been my creative home,” says LSU School of Theatre Associate Professor Shannon Walsh, a theater history scholar who has directed shows and volunteered with TBR. “And I was frustrated because it seemed a little whiplash-y.”
TBR’s former longtime artistic director Jenny Ballard, now a theater professor in Tennessee, led the organization through the pandemic and has been vocal about her belief that the decision was made in haste.
“It never crossed my mind to close the theater. The goal at all times, no matter what, (was) to keep the doors open,” she says. “I really hope that some community effort can be made to save (it), because the community and that theater and its history deserve better than a Saturday morning announcement about the theater closing.”
The announcement came just six days after a Feb. 24 post about board resignations following an allegation about one of its members that had been swirling on social media. TBR declined to discuss the matter with 225, other than to say its investigation was closed.
The issue, which followed other public and behind-the-scenes controversies, exposed TBR’s organizational struggles. At least three board members resigned, according to the announcement. Earlier in February, another board member had resigned “due to leadership concerns.” And so did TBR’s artistic director Sarah Klocke, after less than five months on the job. Klocke did not return requests for comment. Immediate past president Beth Bordelon directed requests for comment to Tettleton.
The closure announcement has shaken the local arts community.
“I never thought that I would see the closing of Theatre Baton Rouge,” says Todd Henry, executive director of the children’s theater nonprofit, Playmakers of Baton Rouge. “It’s always seemed so much bigger than the rest of our companies. And you know, if it can happen there, it could really happen to any of our theater and performing arts organizations.”
Henry acknowledges the pandemic’s brutal impact on the performing arts, an art form based on a screen-free, in-person exchange between actor and spectator. Henry says that for nonprofit theaters to be successful, audiences need to buy tickets or opt into fee-based education programs. Expanding the donor base is also essential, he adds.
“We’re constantly looking for new ways to engage with the community,” Henry says.
A 79-year history—and the biggest game in town
Despite the current climate’s challenges, the local theater sector has sprouted fresh energy and new programming in recent years. The past decade brought live theater newcomers like Red Magnolia Theatre Company and 225 Theatre Collective, groups offering both familiar and experimental productions. Central’s Sullivan Theater has seen steady increases in ticket sales since it opened in 2023. Founder Dave Freneaux says it expects a total sell-out of its March run of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which resumes this weekend.
There’s also been hopeful news for UpStage Theater Company. The small grassroots theater group has been named the resident company for the recently renovated historic Lincoln Theater, which opens this summer as a theater and Black history cultural center. The new Louisiana Shakespeare Company performs Much Ado About Nothing this month at the Cary Saurage Community Arts Center, and will host the inaugural Louisiana Shakespeare Festival in May in Baton Rouge.
The local fabric also includes established players like Ascension Community Theatre and LSU’s professional theater, Swine Palace, among others.
But the core of the community theater ecosystem has long been Theatre Baton Rouge, where many actors, set designers, directors and backstage crews have cut their teeth.
“It’s a loss to the arts in greater Baton Rouge,” Freneaux says. “It’s a place that helped give us our start in several ways.”
Founded by volunteers, the then-named Baton Rouge Civic Theater staged its first shows in a space at Baton Rouge Metro Airport, according to TBR. In 1951, a name change to Baton Rouge Little Theater came about—which many native Baton Rougeans still use.
Its popularity in the late ’50s powered a campaign to build a permanent performance space on Florida Boulevard in the former Bon Marche Shopping Center, now Bon Carré, which the nonprofit still owns. The facility was completed in 1962. That year it staged South Pacific, the first in a long tradition of summer musicals. Annual subscribers, known as members, were the organization’s lifeblood then. By 1970, membership was nearly 6,000.
“There was a time when there were waiting lists to become a member,” Tettleton says.
That’s no longer the case. Over the past five seasons, subscriptions decreased from 937 to 450, she adds.
The Little Theater rebranded as Theatre Baton Rouge in 2013. In 2014, Ballard became its artistic director, drawing new spectators with large-scale productions and plays with edgier subject matter. The same year, TBR added the Young Actors Program, giving youth and teenage performers who had participated in local children’s theater a springboard to more complex shows.
In all its productions, strong talent never seemed in short supply. Regional music and theater teachers auditioned for shows, along with LSU School of Theatre students and alums, some of whom had returned to Baton Rouge after working professionally in larger markets, Walsh says. And there were also scores of everyday auditioners with strong performance skills.
“Some of the shows I have seen at TBR rival shows that I would have seen from when I worked in Minneapolis, which is a huge theater city,” she says.
A bout of long COVID?
Theatre Baton Rouge’s finances have long lived show to show, and on tight margins, Ballard says. She agrees with the current board’s belief that the pandemic eviscerated any possibility it had to get ahead.
Five years ago this month, the nation faced a stay-at-home order and near-total cessation of regular activity. Researchers are still analyzing the impacts. The lockdown resulted in an almost 90% decline in nationwide theater ticket income in 2020, says Corinna Schulenburg, director of communications at Theatre Communications Group, a national organization that releases its Theatre Facts report on the state of nonprofit theaters across the U.S. annually.
Looking at the last five years, Schulenburg points to an overwhelming struggle among theaters to bounce back.
“It’s impossible to imagine a swift rebound from that for any kind of organization, particularly when there were additional headwinds that theaters are facing in terms of attendance and inflationary pressures,” she says.
Indeed, expenses spiked across the board including building supplies, labor and insurance. Following the pandemic, theaters like TBR relied on long-term, low-interest loans from the federal government to stay afloat.
Ballard, at the helm during COVID, recalls the no-choice decision she and the then-board of governors had to make in closing the comedy The Fox on the Fairway set to open in March 2020. Soon after, the organization would apply for a series of federal grants and loans.
The aftermath of COVID was tough. Ballard says the theater cut staff from 11 to three and remaining employees took a 10% paycut. When shows resumed, they generally ran over two weekends rather than three. Along with facing how to raise money and sell tickets during the pandemic, TBR also dealt with board struggles, seeing four different presidents from 2020 to 2021, Ballard says. Burnout contributed to her 2023 decision to leave the organization, she adds.
Across the country, federal loans plugged holes temporarily, adding long-term, low-interest debt to many theaters’ balance sheets. Crowds didn’t return to pre-pandemic numbers, and production costs doubled.
That has left many theaters in an existential crisis today, Schulenburg says. According to TCG’s most recent Theatre Facts report released in March, which examines 2023, theaters are facing not just soft ticket sales, exorbitant expenses and a cessation of federal funding, but also a three-year decline in charitable giving among trustees, which Schulenburg calls a “worrying trend.” Moreover, patrons are showing up for shows here and there, but aren’t opting into long-term commitments.
“The language that gets used is that ‘it’s like a leaky bucket,’” Schulenburg says. “There are audiences going in, but they’re not returning or converting into subscriber or donor status, a pattern that used to be the norm.”
A growing number of theaters, including Theatre Baton Rouge, have had to budget for ongoing deficits.
TBR’s 2023 tax return shows $836,603 in revenue and $993,226 in expenses, leaving a $156,632 budget shortfall. The organization’s reported net assets that tax year were -$300,211.
It squares with what’s happened nationally.
“Theatre Facts 2023 records the worst change in unrestricted net assets or CUNA since we’ve been recording that data, not only in the number of theaters experiencing a negative change in their unrestricted net assets, but also the severity of that change,” Schulenburg says.
Around Baton Rouge, other local performing arts organizations say they have felt the pressure.
Garland Goodwin Wilson, artistic director of the 38-year-old Baton Rouge contemporary dance company Of Moving Colors Productions points to intense challenges across the local sector—including dwindling season subscriptions, a decline in both state funding and charitable giving, and rising costs to rent performance facilities.
“I am amazed that any of the arts organizations remain open,” she says.
TBR’s internal challenges
Theatre Baton Rouge had been open about its post-COVID fiscal challenges in the fall of 2023, launching an urgent $100,000 fundraising campaign called Light the Stage. The community stepped up. Then-board-president Bordelon announced the campaign had surpassed its goal a few weeks later, and that the organization would reset the goal to $175,000.
Throughout the remainder of 2023 and 2024, TBR seemed to be proceeding with business as usual, at least publicly. The 79th season was announced with its usual fanfare in the spring of 2024. In the fall of that year, TBR’s Play Selection Committee decided the shows that would have comprised a milestone 80th season this fall. In October 2024, the board announced the hiring of Klocke. It finally filled a 15-month void left by Ballard, who resigned in 2023 to accept a job at Cumberland University in Tennessee to teach theater. Things appeared to be looking up.
Other recent indicators suggest TBR expected to remain open. It sold ticket bundles in February for its three remaining shows, signaling those shows would take place. Even the Feb. 24 announcement about board leadership changes invited community members interested in filling numerous open positions on the board to reach out.
But behind the scenes, the financial picture was bleak, according to Tettleton. One-time donors from the 2023 Light the Stage campaign didn’t convert into recurring donors, she says. The campaign was “unconventional” in its exclusive focus on paying down debt, she says, including $94,000 in aging accounts payable—debts to local companies that had previously provided TBR goods and services. It’s unclear why a more traditional fundraising campaign wasn’t executed.
“Light the Stage helped clear some of our past debts from the COVID years, but it didn’t necessarily provide long-term stability for the future,” she says. “Individual donors made one-time donations instead of long-term commitments.”
Tettleton says when a quorum of the remaining eight-member board of governors made the unanimous decision to close, it was facing immediate pressure to purchase the rights to perform and advertise the shows selected for the 80th season, an estimated $54,000 outlay.
“There’s a short timeframe with which we would have had to commit and make those payments,” she says.
Overdue building and equipment maintenance costs had also arisen in the last 18 months, some of which stemmed from previous neglect, Tettleton says. She says those included fire safety equipment that had not been properly maintained, sound equipment that was beyond repair, repairs to the theater’s rigging and fly system, plumbing issues, HVAC and safety issues regarding lighting.
Returning to major benefactors also didn’t seem to be in the cards. “We have exhausted every option,” read the closure announcement.
What now?
Tettleton acknowledges the closure has been “a whirlwind decision,” and that it’s too soon to say what might happen next. A handful of concerned theater experts, including Walsh, were meeting with TBR’s board this week to discuss the future. TBR’s facility includes a lobby and bar area, restrooms, classroom space and a 327-seat performing arts hall. For many years, it has also had access to, but does not own, the smaller 97-seat Studio Theatre in an adjacent space next door.
Performance space is an enviable asset in the Capital Region, Walsh says.
“We have a growing landscape of theaters, but we are a very space-poor community,” she says. “I just hope that space doesn’t get bulldozed over or repurposed into something else.”
Space isn’t the only potential loss. The disappearance of a theater organization with such a large number of shows leaves a dearth of audition opportunities, says Freneaux, a past TBR board member and volunteer.
“Absent TBR, there honestly isn’t enough stage and theatrical time in the community for everybody who wants to be involved,” he says.
Stakeholder meetings are ongoing.
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“I don’t know what it looks like—I don’t have a crystal ball,” Tettleton says. “But hopefully something productive will come from conversations with some of the other community arts organizations in the city.”
In the meantime, TBR goes dark after Xanadu’s Sunday curtain call.
A 79-season history is impressive by any measure. But for the theater’s many fans, it makes it even more heartbreaking.