Colorado arts attendance may never fully recover from pandemic shutdown

The pandemic shutdown was just the beginning of a nightmare that Colorado’s arts organizations are only slowly waking up from.

Attendance at cultural events, especially indoor events like plays, films and museums, is getting better – but has not returned to pre-pandemic levels. And it is increasingly beginning to look like it never will.

“We’re seeing 80% of pre-pandemic attendance,” said Philip Sneed, President and CEO of the Arvada Center. “We’re projecting 82% for fiscal year 2022-23 – and the trendline looks to be flattening.”

The goal for now, Sneed said, is to one day build back to 85% – and then think of that as the new normal. The question is: How many arts organizations might be able to survive if 85% becomes the new normal? 

“If we settle for 15% below what we had before the pandemic, I think we can all live with that – and then, we’ll start building from there,” Sneed said. “But I think we are either looking at something permanent … or a very long rebuild.”

A new Denver Gazette analysis of attendance data from across a swath of Colorado arts organizations shows that 2022 attendance was commonly down between 20 and 50% from comparable pre-pandemic periods. And the numbers make starkly plain what a struggle it has been for them to bounce back. For example:

• Denver Film CEO Kevin Smith says in-house attendance for movies at the Sie FilmCenter was down a full 56% in 2022 compared to the last full pre-pandemic year in 2019 (from 76,830 to 34,187). Attendance at its signature Denver Film Festival, which hit an all-time high of about 40,000 in 2019, was just 20,737 in 2022 – a drop of 48%.

“This has been really difficult and challenging on nonprofits, but also on anyone who owns an indoor venue of any kind,” Smith said.

• Attendance was down 34 percent at the Denver Art Museum but, like Denver Film and most every local arts organization – it roared into 2020 off a record-shattering 2019. Total attendance for the museum's final full fiscal year before the pandemic (October 2018 through September 2019) was a jaw-dropping 989,745. The 2021-22 figure was 656,342.

• Attendance at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College plummeted 42.8 percent in 2022 compared to 2019. That includes a 43 percent drop in museum attendance (from 33,115 to 18,956) and a stunning 59 percent drop in theater attendance (from 33,619 to 13,723).

• Attendance at the Arvada Center’s plays and musicals was down a combined 24% from September 2021 to March 13, 2022, compared to the same dates in 2019-20. Before the shutdown, the Arvada Center was generating $5 million a year in ticket sales for all performing arts offerings. “We are projecting just $4 million for fiscal 2022-23,” Sneed said – ”and we’re going to miss that by $350,000.”

Overall, these findings closely align with a national survey of 224 organizations by a data-mining company called Impacts Experience that reported 2022 attendance at performance-based cultural organizations averaged 80.8% of 2019 attendance. Attendance at exhibit-based cultural organizations fared considerably better. Museums, historic sites, aquariums, zoos, botanic gardens and science centers averaged 96.4% of their 2019 attendance levels in 2022, according to the survey.

By any measure, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts is one of the largest regional arts centers in the country. The DCPA primarily hosts Broadway touring productions and produces its own live theater programming through its venerable DCPA Theatre Company.

But its latest figures come with one giant asterisk, because the DCPA only reports attendance by fiscal years. Because of its sheer size, the DCPA was the last major local arts organization to return to full programming (in November 2021), so its most recent 2021-22 annual report reflects only the seven months of programming that took place after reopening. And it ends before taking into account what CEO Janice Sinden says was a strong second half of the calendar year. All of which means “that the 2021-22 numbers don’t accurately reflect what was actually a strong comeback,” she said.

That said: Broadway attendance fell 40% – from 562,000 in fiscal year 2019 to 337,000 in 2022. On the Theatre Company side, attendance fell from 124,312 to 82,390, while offering one fewer production – by average attendance per show, the drop was just 24%. But those numbers are more evidence of lost opportunity than audience interest, Sinden believes. The shutdown hit DCPA Broadway at a particularly unfortunate time, because it had a string of already sold-out blockbusters waiting in the wings, including “The Lion King” and “Hamilton.”

“2020 was going to blow us right out of the ballpark,” said DCPA Director of Communications Suzanne Yoe.

On the outside looking up

One might presume that if it was simply COVID fear keeping some audiences away from indoor events, then the numbers should be surging at safer outdoor venues, but the data there is contradictory. A record-shattering 1.54 million attended ticketed events at Red Rocks in 2022 – up a full 32% over the record set the year before. But at the very same venue, attendance at Denver Film’s signature Film on the Rocks series (29,235) was down 20% last summer compared to 2019 – although average attendance per screening was down by only 4%.

Attendance for the venerable Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s 64th season (half indoors, half outdoors) was down 21% last summer compared to 2019 (from 28,296 to 22,491). But, here again, the 2019 overall total approached a 20-year high.

How good was 2019 for others? Consider that when Denver Film drew nearly 77,000 to the Sie FilmCenter that year, it broke the nonprofit’s record for any previous year – by 20,000. “2019 was a banner year for us,” Smith said, “so everything else is going to hurt by comparison.”

The Denver Art Museum nearly topped 1 million in attendance in 2018-19, largely on the strength of two massive hits: "Dior: From Paris to the World" and "Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze."

More to the story than COVID

So, what’s going on here? Certainly, COVID is playing its part. But the reasons for such large, across-the-board attendance drops are more complex than mere COVID hesitancy – if that is even a concern anymore. Wearing masks at indoor cultural events is now optional – and increasingly scarce.

But positive COVID tests among artists and crews is continuing to wipe out performances, costing companies both in revenues and attendance. Perhaps the largest factor in this anemic 2022 attendance report is that programming itself has not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Even after fully reopening in November 2021, the DCPA endured waves of canceled shows in the weeks that followed, including nine performances of “The Lion King” and the entire run of “Riverdance.”

“In all, we canceled 44 performances due to cast illness, extreme weather and HVAC issues, which resulted in $3.7 million in lost gross revenue,” said Yoe.

At the Arvada Center, Omicron shut down the final nine performances of “Elf, The Musical,” the final seven performances of "Kinky Boots" and the first nine performances of the play “Stick Fly.”

COVID hasn’t gone away but performing companies have adapted more nimbly to positive cases by doubling and even tripling their pool of "understudy" replacement performers to assure that, whenever possible, the shows will go on, COVID or not.

But there are far bigger and more systemic reasons for the numbers that can’t be explained away by the pandemic. Long before the COVID shutdown brought the world to a standstill, Public Enemies No. 1, 2 and 3 already had been identified as Netflix, 85-inch home TV screens and cozy basement couches. And when the shutdown came, Americans settled in for the long haul, permanently altering their entertainment routines.

“During the pandemic, all my entertainment became online viewing,” said Vintage Theatre Artistic Director Bernie Cardell. And, over time, a pattern becomes a routine that becomes … very hard to break.

“My sense is that people did get into the habit of turning to online entertainment,” Cardell said. "But what they can’t get from that is that energetic connection that you can only get from the live experience.”

Sneed thinks Netflix and COVID make for convenient scapegoats, but sometimes it really does come down to a roll of the programming dice. The Arvada Center’s recent staging of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,” for example, was the third highest-grossing production in its nearly 50-year history, while the generally equally beloved “Into the Woods” fell $250,000 short of its revenue goal.

“Every year has its hits and misses,” Sneed said. “Was it because of Netflix or COVID that we missed on that projection – or did we simply overestimate the audience’s interest in ‘Into the Woods’? We don’t know.”

The fact is, audiences have been trending away from traditional indoor, sedentary storytelling forms like plays and musicals in favor of immersive, mobile and often non-narrative experiences for more than a decade. And in rapid fashion, Denver has become one of the country’s immersive hotbeds.

The Denver Center calls its most adventurous programming wing Off-Center, and in 2021-22, it drew a boggling 151,249 to its three interactive audience experiences: “Van Gogh Alive,” “Mixed Taste” and “Camp Christmas.” More recently, David Byrne’s just-completed “Theater of the Mind” drew 42,000 to a warehouse in northeast Denver, just 16 at a time. That’s good news for the bottom line but does not fix the conundrum of how to lure audiences back into a seat in an indoor theater or cinema.

Bright side of the road

You have to dig a little to find arts organizations that are exceeding their pre-pandemic attendance numbers, but one unlikely exception is The Candlelight in Johnstown, one of the last remaining dinner theaters in Colorado. While the 45-year-old BDT Stage has set a tentative closing date of Aug. 19, attendance at the 15-year-old Candlelight was up 29% last year over 2019 – an increase from 62,700 to 80,100.

The Candlelight presented seven family friendly titles in 2020, ranging from popular fare like “The Sound of Music” and “Singin’ in the Rain” to kid-pleasers like “Cinderella” to virtually unknown epics like “The Scarlet Pimpernel.” In the arts, any production that sells above 95% of capacity for its entire run is considered a sellout. And by that measure, company rep Jalyn Webb said, Candlelight sold out the entire calendar year. That never happens anywhere.

Webb says all the things that seemingly have made dinner theater go out of style are the very same things that are now making dinner theater a hot ticket in Larimer County:

“It’s gathering entire families around the dinner table and offering them an entertainment experience they can share together,” she said. It’s also intensely curated customer services. And, above all, she said, it’s the quality of the shows.

She says The Candlelight, located 40 miles north of Denver on I-25, is attracting audiences across political, ideological and geographic lines. The Candlelight has season-ticketholders, she said, from Castle Rock, Wyoming, Nebraska and even South Dakota who drive in for every show.

“I think there is nothing really out there in the world like dinner theater,” Webb said. “There are no more roller rinks. People don’t go to the movie theater as much. There just are not as many entertainment places to go with the entire family anymore.”

A brighter day on the way

Now well into 2023, things are starting to look considerably better for arts organizations based on trend lines that are emerging in real time. For example:

From Dec. 1, 2022, through Jan. 31, 2023, attendance at the Sie FilmCenter was up 150% over the same period a year before. “Right now, we are projecting our 2023 attendance at the Sie tracking somewhere up to 50,000,” said Smith – which would represent a 46% bump over 2022. But at the same time, he said, venue owners have to step it up, too.

“Once you feel comfortable patronizing these businesses again, it’s really important that you do so,” he said. “We need the audience to come back. But we also need to up the ante in terms of the experience that we are providing for people.”

The DCPA also appears well on its way to a robust recovery that won’t be fully documented until its next fiscal report, which also will reflect the return of its Education Department’s popular Theatre for Young Audiences programming. The bottom line, Yoe said: People are coming to the shows that they can come to.

“We would have had a banner year in fiscal 2022 if we had offered 12 months of programming,” she said. “The sales that we have been seeing since, I think, speaks to the enthusiasm our audiences feel for the entire local cultural community.”

But one word of caution, she said: Inflation is real. The supply shortage is real. The labor shortage is real. The minimum wage has gone up. And ticket prices will have to reflect that.

“Now that we have reopened our doors, we’re all being faced with an exorbitant increase in costs,” she said. “And all of those things are making it harder for all of us nonprofits to rebound as quickly as we would like.” 

While organizations are going to have to continue to adapt to changing audience tastes, Sneed is convinced that this present crisis is not an existential one.

“People have been predicting the death of live theater for centuries,” he said, “and it just never dies.”