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A packed house

At 200, the Walnut Street Theatre has more subscribers, more history, and more gusto for growth than perhaps any other.

The curtain will soon rise on the third century of the Walnut Street Theatre at 9th and Walnut Streets. (Sharon Gekoski-Kimmel/Staff Photographer)
The curtain will soon rise on the third century of the Walnut Street Theatre at 9th and Walnut Streets. (Sharon Gekoski-Kimmel/Staff Photographer)Read more

Buy a single ticket to the Walnut Street Theatre - just one ticket for a specific show - and you'll be asked to be a theater critic.

"How did you like the show?" someone will inquire in a phone call a few days later - and then tell you what subscription options you have for more shows at the nation's oldest working theater.

Tomorrow - the actual date it opened in 1809, as a circus - the theater company celebrates its bicentennial with an invited audience and some performers who have appeared there over the decades. But it's not just an homage to the past, it's a celebration of the present, because the Walnut has the most subscribers of any theater in the nation, and probably the world.

So far this season, it has sold 56,098 subscriptions, slightly down from its high, last season, of 57,570. (It's midseason, and people are still buying.)

The theater's salespeople rely heavily on the same telemarketing they've used for the last 26 years, ever since the theater was transformed from a booking house that brought in plays to a theater company that produces its own. But they've learned a lot of tricks along the way.

One is to offer the personal touch - that call you get after buying a ticket to a show. "We try to take people to the next rung up the ladder," says Rebekah Sassi, director of institutional advancement. "We have to get them in. Once they're in, we can talk about what else we do."

That quick discussion may involve the children's shows the company brings in, or the season it produces in its 80-seat Independence Studio on 3 - more intimate plays. Like other theater companies across the country with more than one stage, the Walnut counts subscribers to any of its offerings in its total.

And, like every other theater company, it works hard to get subscribers, and to keep them. Its uncommon success has much to do with a play list that caters to the largest possible audience - but more to do with a well-oiled telecommunications division and a general mindset: Treat the huge nonprofit regional theater like a business, and get bodies in those seats, especially the 1,088 that face the main stage.

"We have invested a lot of money and we want a maximum return on our investment," says Bernard Havard, the Walnut's president and producing artistic director. "I have a sign at my desk. It says 'Nonprofit is a tax code, not a management style.' "

Almost as soon as Havard arrived at the Walnut in 1982, he began telemarketing for subscribers - people who would buy a season's worth of tickets and bank on the company's ability to produce work they would enjoy and admire. Havard did this even before there was a Walnut season; in his first year he wanted to plan and organize.

He was already a fan of the mantra of the late Chicago Lyric Opera publicist Danny Newman - Sell subscriptions! - and had taken it to Atlanta, where he led Alliance Theatre to its highest-ever subscription rate.

People responded to the phone calls about a new theater company on Philadelphia's historic stage, which had been mostly dark at that time. The only other major presenter in the city was the now-defunct Drama Guild, which had played at the Walnut but moved west to the Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

By the first season of Walnut plays, in 1983, the company had 14,514 subscribers, largely from a telemarketer Havard had contracted. But he eventually killed that arrangement, deciding the Walnut would be better off with its own staff selling tickets on their own machinery, guided by in-house sales ideas. "It was one of the best decisions I ever made," he says, particularly in its cost benefits.

Most theaters contract with outside vendors who charge between 40 and 50 percent of all new subscription business, he says. The Walnut's in-house operation costs 26 percent of every new order.

Whom to call? The Walnut began working with other cultural institutions in the city, sharing information.
"And we worked with individual Broadway producers to get lists of Philadelphians who went to Broadway shows," says Mark D. Sylvester, the Walnut's managing director. Havard hired him away from Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami 15 years ago, and he runs the Walnut's day-to-day administrative affairs.

The Walnut came to look at marketing its eight main-stage performances a week "like airlines do," Sylvester says. "We have 1,088 seats and we have eight flights a week, and we want to maximize every seat. The way to do this is to make the theater accessible to the widest number of people we possibly can."

That starts with the Walnut's production choices. "People have to be interested in you," Sylvester says. Then, they have to be able to afford you. Taken together, main-stage subscribers in all categories of seating and performances paid an average $29.29 per show this season. To this day, the Walnut markets the 22 seats that make up the last row in its mezzanine for $10 apiece at every performance - live theater in a major venue, for less than the price of a movie and popcorn.

The Walnut spends a lot of energy figuring out who a typical subscriber is - then going after potential new ones who fit the profile. With the help of a marketing firm, the staff assembled 1.2 million names of people who attend the arts here, a cultural pool of candidates for subscriptions. Looking at the subscriber profile, that pool was whittled to 500,000.

"From that half-million," Sylvester says, "we have developed our own models about who is most likely to subscribe. That's how we make our decisions about who to mail a brochure to first, and who we call first."

The staff, which numbers between 12 and 40, depending on the season, calls about 300,000 people a year for new business, all the while renewing current subscribers. Calls are supplemented by postcards with ticket offers for subscribing by a certain date, or after a season begins. The entire operation is supported by advertising in newspapers and on bus shelters, billboards, radio and occasionally TV, often with the help of media sponsors - also sought by the Walnut.

The Walnut's renewal rate was 83 percent this season. But maintaining its place as the nation's most-subscribed theater is hardly a matter of waiting for audiences to voluntarily send in their renewal checks.

"We still have to bring in in excess of 10,000 subscribers year after year," Sylvester says, with the determination of a man who knows that next season, it begins all over.