Making the Scene

Scott Mayer, founder and director of the Ivey Awards, states that the Twin Cities are currently home to 69 professional theater companies (most of them nonprofits) that he calls “Ivey eligible,” meaning they’ve existed for at least one year and they pay their actors and administrative staff. “I would guess that New York City has more theater seats,” Mayer says, “but I believe we have the most professional theater companies in the country.”

In a 2001 article, Star Tribune theater critic Graydon Royce attempted to quantify the local theater scene. “About 2.3 million seats were sold by theaters in the Twin Cities during the fiscal year ended in 2000—nearly equal to the combined regular-season 1999 attendance for the Minnesota Twins, Vikings, and Timberwolves,” he wrote. “That figures to a ratio of 0.82 tickets per capita—based on the 2000 census population of 2.8 million for the metro area. The comparable figure in Seattle—a city often compared to the Twin Cities—is 0.56. It’s 0.45 in Chicago.”

Forty-five years ago, there were virtually no professional theater companies here. Now, there are something like 69—a development at least as unlikely as Minnesotans exchanging air kisses.

Royce also wrote, based on research conducted by the Star Tribune, that “the combined annual budgets of the theater companies that operate in the Twin Cities area is about $90 million, com-pared with $55 million in Seattle, an estimated $30 million in Philadelphia, $28 million in Boston,” and for Chicago, a metropolitan area about three times the size of Minneapolis–St. Paul, the number was $180 million. Needless to say, such findings got many people inside and adjacent to the theater community excited: At last, there were some actual numbers, based on research, to substantiate the anecdotal claims.

Ann Markusen, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs whose research focuses on the economic impacts of the arts in this region, also has well-researched numbers. Markusen has looked at the number of performing artists (actors, directors, dancers, choreographers) in the metropolitan area and at the money they bring in from elsewhere through touring and commissions and spend locally—thus contributing to the local economy.

“Performing artists are 30 percent ‘overrepresented’ in the Twin Cities, which is just below writers and authors, and more than musicians and more than visual artists,” she says. “Overrepresented” means that as a share of the local work force, they figure more prominently than they do in the national work force.