I was once riding in a cab with some people from a New York City theater company and fell into discussion with their artistic director/producer. I told him about the Midtown International Theatre Festival (MITF), then in its first season. The year was 2000. He asked me if I had any trepidation about the upcoming festival.
“No sweat,” I said. “We’re paying the theater a third of the gross. The shows are getting a third of the gross. So we’re guaranteed a third of the gross. What can go wrong?”
He nodded sagely, as one does when talking to a lunatic.
Not long after, if memory holds, the theater dumped us on the basis that we had no legitimate press agent and were likely to scratch up a giant Zero on the box-office scoreboard (actually, we ended up doing well in the grosses department; net…not so much). We now had to hustle to get venues, and that involved paying some of them cash. Even theaters aren’t stupid in July. And I needed some staff to open said theaters while I was raking in the money on Wall Street to pay the losses on the Festival.
Still, we presented some 19 shows, spread out over four theaters (not sure why; the details are lost to the mists of time). I think we grossed $35,000 and lost $15,000, though I’m not sure.
I started the Festival because I got a bright idea while publishing a little magazine called oobr, an acronym for Off-Off-Broadway Review -- “the only publication devoted exclusively to reviewing the Off-Off-Broadway scene.”
Actually, MITF was the brainchild of one of my reviewers, responding to the birth of FringeNYC by suggesting we needed a Midtown fringe festival. Nobody else leapt on his idea, so two years later, I did.
Our beginnings were humble. Put it this way: two of our theaters were at 750 Eighth Avenue. Those with gray enough hair will remember the building with a shudder. I brought bagels for the crew at a production meeting; 20 minutes after putting them down, ready for a snack, I opened the bag and found it crawling with roaches. We had only one box office and theaters on two floors, so the public was always getting lost. Not to mention the critic who ended up stuck in the elevator, which wasn’t the most reliable means of vertical transport.
Still, we struggled on. I got laid off just after 9/11 but kept going with the Festival, funding it by the time-honored method of deficit financing. We moved up in our taste in theaters, slowly but surely. Just after the layoff, I had another brainwave -- why not start a rehearsal studio in the Garment District, where Off-Off-Broadway production companies seemed to cluster?
Since I had an excellent 1040 from the previous year, and owned some property in Massachusetts, I was able to get a real-estate company to rent me a studio on W. 36th St., near 9th Ave. I sat in the studio and looked out at the empty spaces, hypnotized by the pigeons arcing in the air. I called the studio Where Eagles Dare, for the young actors spreading their wings. Soon, I had another studio on the ground floor, which I converted into a theater. It seated 40 on risers and was a perfect space for solo shows. Unfortunately I had to dump the theater when my lease ran out because a comedy club started up next door, and the MC’s amplification was intolerable.
Always the aggressive entrepreneur, I expanded the upstairs studio to three spaces, notwithstanding the old saw that the two principal reasons for business failure are undercapitalization and too-rapid expansion, both of which I exhibited in spades. Somehow I convinced my landlord to let me trade in my upstairs studios for a whole floor, thereby increasing my overhead to a crushing figure. Better not run into bad financial weather!
Of course, the financial crash of 2008-10 happened immediately, and Where Eagles Dare slid, first slowly and then with increasing velocity, into a sea of red ink, never to return.
Still, the MITF continued. My managing producer had been a stalwart soul over seven years, but we came to a parting of the ways in 2011. I had to hire a whole new staff, and the new arrivals were from Off-, not Off-Off-, Broadway, meaning I was paying a whole lot more to present a theater festival with $15 tickets. After a disastrous year in 2015, when I had insufficient shows in the lineup to support two expensive theaters, the writing was on the wall for my days of theatrical entrepreneurship (also for my health, which deteriorated sharply in 2017). I shuttered the MITF in 2017.
Would I do it again? Damn straight. Maybe if I learned to anticipate problems better, to look around corners as I speeded toward oblivion, I’d have had better luck. But for over 20 years I was intimately involved with New York Theater. Now I’m relaxing in the Florida sun, starting to get antsy about writing screenplays and maybe starting an online streaming festival. Who knows? I may be b-a-a-a-c-k….
(Photo Credit: Ben Strothmann)
John Chatterton always wanted to be in the theater. When he was about 7, he was onstage in a school play. He tripped on his shoelace, and the audience laughed -- so he did it again. In later years, he migrated to writing, then producing. To make a living, he worked in newspaper production and then technical writing and programming. He finally made a break and started producing full-time Off-Off-Broadway with the Midtown International Theatre Festival (MITF), which ran for 18 years. He now lives in Florida, trying to avoid a tan and find a decent bagel.
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