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McDonald: Ready for the digital age.
With a new team and vision in place, Anthony McDonald begins his second year running New Haven’s historic Shubert Theatre with an eye fixed on the future as more people venture back out to public events.
“It’s about the totality now,” said McDonald, the Shubert’s executive director, in explaining how the historic theater is moving into a reopened future, which last month involved a sponsored jazz performance at Q House, a reading from David Sedaris, and a concert by celebrated jazz pianist Monty Alexander, and this month includes performances from the New Haven Symphony Orchestra and the dance group MOMIX, a cinematic tour of astrophysics from Professor Brian Cox, and a visit from Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.
On the grandest scale, McDonald’s ideas for the theater mean figuring out how to engage with as many different audiences in the New Haven community as possible, and forging stronger connections between the theater and the panoply of local businesses around it.
They have meant looking at how the Shubert can expand its programming while maintaining what’s tried and true.
That approach, in turn, has meant expanding the inner workings of the theater administration itself.
“We are in a very multicultural community, and as the only player in this town doing what we do, how we do it, there should be an expectation on us to provide different kinds of programming and genres to this diverse community. Because if we’re not doing it, then where else are they going to get it?” McDonald said.
The Shubert exists in an ecosystem of theaters stretching across the state (and, of course, into New York City), and theatergoers patronize them all. But “if we’re doing our part, they’ll realize they can just come downtown, realize all New Haven has to offer, and then come see a show. And then you can experience more after that. Go to the Anchor Spa. Go to the Owl Shop.”
Realizing that goal involves making sure that the Shubert as an organization is working as well as it can, with McDonald coordinating it all. “It’s about working with the marketing team, the development team, the facilities and operations team, the education team.”
McDonald became the Shubert’s executive director in March 2021, replacing John Fisher, who helmed the theater for over 20 years. The first six months “we were in survival mode,” he said, due to the pandemic. He also spent the time hiring staff to fill 10 positions at the Shubert.
“It’s unique in the sense that I was able to try to create a new team around me that had skill sets that may not have existed here before,” he said.
Among those skills involved digital marketing, for which he hired Brea Bremser, in a new position. “From what I could gather, we never had someone whose background was strictly digital marketing,” he said. “It’s 2022, and the digital side of marketing is a quite important facet. It’s not just about social media, and it’s not just about posting…. It’s about understanding where your audience is coming from. How are they finding your content? How are they finding your website? It’s understanding how to reach them in different places, whether it’s Spotify or YouTube, to social media ads … it’s looking at the totality of the digital side of the world.”
Kimberly Wipfler Photo
Chill Band performs at Shubert-sponsored Thelonious Monk tribute event at Stetson Branch Library.
McDonald wanted someone who was “keeping up with the trends and staying on top of it” — which, in his experience, was unusual for a theater to do. “What theater tends to do, as a whole, not just here, is that it tends to be behind the times — five to 10 years behind. Theater at times can be slow to react. I saw that need, and I knew that we were going to try to do something different here we had to fill that hole.”
McDonald also tasked Azaria Samuels, new group sales and business development associate, to actively cultivate relationships with several New Haven-based organizations — such as The Links, the Divine Nine fraternities and sororities, Gateway and Yale, and churches — to facilitate group sales of tickets that the organizations could then offer to their members.
McDonald has seen the strategy already pay off. “When we did a show in October with the Dance Theater of Harlem, we had so many kids and dance schools here, because [Samuels] was out there pushing that show to the people who would benefit the most from it. And they came out, in full force.”
McDonald has also embarked on renovating parts of the building. “The CEO of the company — I think he thought I was a little crazy at the beginning,” McDonald said with a laugh when he lobbied for replacing capets. “And I said, ‘let me take you on a little journey.’ And I showed him the most offensive carpet in the building.”
“OK, I get it, I get it,” McDonald recalled the CEO saying. “That’s theater. Sometimes you have to experience it live.”
By summertime of 2021 those and other improvements had been made, and with theater productions seeming possible again, the Shubert plotted out its season. Then came the Delta wave of Covid-19. As that subsided, the theater mounted several shows in the fall, including the visit from the Dance Theatre. Then the omicron wave disrupted attendance again, during the holiday season.
“It has really been only two months that we’re in another upswing of believing that Covid is behind us. But is it ever really behind us?” McDonald said.
For McDonald, the key — based on soliciting audience feedback on Covid-19 protocols, which he said ran the gamut of opinions — was to implement policies that made audience members feel safe coming back, “to understand that it’s okay.”
“You do what it takes so it’s not that big of a burden,” he said of the theater’s mask policies. “As of today,” he added, the theater requires masks inside. “We can do this. Yes, it’s annoying, but if it makes us able to experience theaters and concerts again, then so be it.” That said, with another drop in cases in Connecticut, McDonald has noted theaters across the state dropping their mask mandates. The Shubert may follow suit later this month, and McDonald sees the rationale. “It’s something we as a society are going to have to get comfortable with,” he said of living long-term with the virus. “We can’t continue to live as if the threat is just as dangerous as it was before vaccinations, before an understanding of what we were facing. After two years of living with this thing, we know so much more.”
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Monty Alexander and T.K. Blue performing Saturday at the Shubert.
With the possibility of long-term planning for the theater, rather than the stops and starts the pandemic imposed, McDonald can turn his attention to a larger mission of expanding the Shubert’s programming, reaching a wider audience, and connecting more with the immediate community around the theater.
“My biggest hope for this upcoming year is that the diverse program that we’re bringing is well-received, well-attended, and brings the community together. That’s what theater can do — bring people together for an experience that happens one night only,” McDonald said. In the theater, “what we’re experiencing tonight, today, will never happen again, and we’re here together, as a community, experiencing that with one another. So that’s the goal for next year — that we can continue to expand what the Shubert is known for, and continue to expand our audience in this community.”
Next year, he hopes, is “when we bring different cultures onto our stage and present them in a positive way, and allow those communities to come out and support it, so they can let me know they want to see more of that.”
To achieve that goal, McDonald is always seeking a deeper understanding of just what people want to see at the Shubert — whether it’s a reading by David Sedaris or a jazz concert by Monty Alexander, which happened on the same day recently, or dance, theater, music, or comedy that regularly represents people from across New Haven’s diverse cultural spectrum.
For people within each of those communities, “it’s trying to make sure people realize they don’t have to leave here to find that kind of entertainment.” Just as important, for everyone, “it’s a chance to experience a different culture within your own community. Even if we’re putting different groups on the stage, it doesn’t mean that it’s just for that one culture. We know people are curious, and love art, whether it’s a Jamaican group one night, a Puerto Rican group the next night, and an Italian group after that.”
McDonald’s vision for the Shubert for next year feeds into his broader vision as the executive director of a regional theater hub, helping foster the next generation of artists and appreciative audiences. This focuses everything he has planned, from further capital improvements to the theater (including new seating and an upgraded sound and light system), to building stronger relationships with New Haven’s artists, to finding new ways to use the theater without losing the core of what has kept the Shubert going for decades.
“It boils all back down to the kids in the community, that they can see themselves represented on that stage, so as they grow up, they can understand that there’s room for them — that there’s opportunity for them in this world,” McDonald said. “Hopefully they’ll grow up saying ‘that first show I saw was at the Shubert Theatre, and that’s what clicked in my head. That’s when I realized that’s what I wanted to do.’ If we’re not doing that, then where does the next generation come from?”
Why doesn’t the Shubert do an amateur night once a month with inexpensive admission tickets? Like Apollo theater but in New Haven? I bet it would be a hugely popular success and would give publicity to new artists just starting out like singers, musicians, dancers, spoken word poets, actors, comedians and other performance artists. Many Broadway acts used to come to New Haven to try out their shows here and then fine tune them before taking them on a national tour and then to NYC. We should once again be the trying ground for young/new talent.