Photos courtesy of Richard Teller
By Debbie Gardner
debbieg@thereminder.com
In an unassuming building on a quiet street in West Springfield, locally based live theater is gearing up to celebrate its 19th season of entertaining Valley audiences.
That in and of itself is a remarkable feat.
For producer and Majestic Theater founder Danny Eaton of Longmeadow, Massachusetts, it’s validation that his dream was not only attainable, but also sustainable.
“It proves the point that a professional theater can exist and survive here in Western Massachusetts and support local actors and directors and scene designers and choreographers and such,” said Eaton, who took PRIME’s late-summer call in the alley behind the Majestic during a break between a children’s theater performance and setting up for an evening event. “Our programming is a mix of comedy and drama and classic plays and musicals, and the traditional subscriber audience is very successful for us.
“In the end I think it just comes down to the fact that we’re a regional theater that’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing,” Eaton added.
Filling a void
The Majestic is not the first regional live theater to entertain audiences here in Western Massachusetts. Those of a certain age may remember another regional theater that also had roots in West Springfield, Stage West.
The popular theater, which relocated from its original home on the grounds of the Big E to downtown Springfield in the 1980s, suffered a double blow of dwindling audiences and mounting debts in the 1990s. In May of 1998, Stage West brought down its final curtain on a 31-year run.
Eaton, too, was intimately familiar with Stage West. He started his career there in the 1970s, working in the theater’s bar, and as an assistant director. He was still with the theater when it made the big move to downtown Springfield. During the relocation, the theater’s marketing team did a survey of area residents. Eaton said the results were surprising.
“Eighty percent of the population of Western Massachusetts had never seen a [live] play, had never gone to the theater,” Eaton said. “That was kind-of a startling statistic.”
It was also a daunting realization for someone who had dreams of starting his own theater.
“There were a couple of ways to think about that,” Eaton said. “The most obvious way – why would someone try to be in the theater business here? The other way to look at it [was] to think about it in terms of Coca Cola and China – you have a wide-open market.”
He also knew there was an untapped talent pool in the Pioneer Valley.
“There were a few equity actors who lived in the Valley, but there were also others who couldn’t get an audition at Stage West, our local regional theater,” Eaton said. “That flew in the face of why there would be a system of regional theaters, to help performers.”
In 1992, Eaton set out to try and remedy the situation by founding The Theater Project, creating a production model so the Valley’s theater artists “didn’t have to bail out of Western Massachusetts and take their talent and skills out of [the area]” to get work.
“Here is a professional venue and we’re casting this play and we’re hiring actors who were non-union and we paid them,” Eaton said about the theater’s beginnings. “On principal, we paid everyone who worked on the play – backstage or on stage. If you are getting paid, you are acknowledging that you work as a professional [and] the local talent pool kept us going.”
The second part of that project was “to find and develop a permanent performance facility,” Eaton explained.
In 1995, he chose Elm Street’s Majestic Theater, which was built in the 1920s as a movie house, but had been closed since the early 1970s.
“We were performing across the street in a church hall and a few other places while we renovated the Majestic,” Eaton said. In 1997, the Theater Project took up permanent residence in the refurbished theater.
A different vibe
Eaton said he hears from subscribers all the time how much The Majestic reminds them of going to see a play at the original Stage West.
“They feel welcome. You don’t really find that at every theater,” Eaton said.
The intimacy of the 220-seat performance space and the onsite café – with a down-to-earth menu of familiar sandwiches and soups that changes with each play during the season – coupled with Eaton’s careful attention to play selection all add to the sense that The Majestic “gets” the Valley’s audience.
“It’s the customer service and the vibe” that helps make the theatre successful, Eaton said.
That customer service extends to the kinds of entertainment The Majestic offers its 4,000-plus subscribers and walk-in theatergoers.
Bottom line, it comes down to knowing your market, Eaton said.
“My principal job is being and advocate for the audience,” he said. “I’m from here. I grew up here. “
Eaton was raised in Springfield, graduated from Commerce High School and attended both Holyoke Community College and Amherst College, where he received a bachelor’s degree in writing and directing.
He also holds a Master’s degree in playwriting from Wesleyan University.
“When I’m trying to put a season together every year, it’s the play or the story in the play or the music of a play that somehow speaks to me and I connect with it and I think that our audience will connect with it, too,” he added.
That, he explained, is one of the reasons “The Buddy Holly Story” returns to the Majestic every couple of seasons.
“People keep asking me to bring it back,” he said. “It has gotten people into the theater who have never been there before, and made them subscribers.”
A theater for all seasons
Part of Eaton’s success is always finding a way to make sure people keep The Majestic in mind as a place for entertainment. When the traditional theater season ends in May, Eaton said the theater launches into a full slate of day and evening activities.
“Summer is busier than the regular year,” he admitted.
For example, The Majestic produces three children’s plays each summer, geared to audiences between six and 10 years of age.
“We hire high school kids every year [and] they work in repertoire,” Eaton said, “We pay them $50 a week [to] perform and they are the next generation of actors. The people who started out in our children’s theater years ago now come back and do our main stage plays.”
The kids who attend, he said, are enthusiastic theatergoers.
The student actors “take their bows and go running out to the front of the café and the kids line up with their programs for autographs and selfies,” Eaton said. “We’re crafting not only a future generation of performers, but creating a future generation of audience members.”
For his adult audience, Eaton said the Majestic offers a summer’s worth of concerts, open mic nights and improv.
Come September, The Majestic returns to what it does best – offer live performances to Valley theatergoers at a ticket price that never tops $30, even on a Saturday night.
The 2015-2016 Main Stage season includes “ A Streetcar Named Desire (Sept. 10 to Oct. 18); “The Fabulous Lipitones” (Oct. 29 to Dec. 6): “An Inspector Calls” (Jan. 7 to Feb. 14); “Butler” (Feb 25 to April 3); and “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” (April 14 to May 22). For tickets call 413-747-7797. For more information visit www.majestictheater.com.
