Broadway is coming back to Baltimore! The France-Merrick Center for Performing Arts’ Hippodrome Theatre is once again alive with the sounds of music and laughter and live people! The 2022/2023 season is simply spectacular, to use the vernacular! In a TheatreBloom exclusive interview, we’ve had a phone conversation with President of the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center Ron Legler all about the new season and what’s exciting him the most about the nine shows— five of which are currently still on Broadway— that will be passing through Charm City starting in November of 2022.
Before we get started with Ron, we’d like to point out what’s coming!
Broadway Across America’s Hippodrome Broadway Series 2022/2023
- Tina: The Tina Turner Musical (11/15/22 – 11/20/22)
- Jagged Little Pill (12/13/22 – 12/18/22)
- My Fair Lady (01/10/23 – 01/15/23)
- Les Miserables (02/07/23 – 02/12/23)
- Beautiful: The Carole King Musical (03/03/23 – 03/04/23)
- To Kill A Mockingbird (03/14/23 – 03/19/23)
- Hadestown (04/11/23 – 04/16/23)
- Six (05/09/23 – 05/14/23)
- Frozen (06/07/23 – 06/18/23)
Ron, thank you so much for giving us some of your time today. I’m so very excited to talk with you today!
Ron Legler: I’m excited as well, thanks for having me! We had a great day yesterday. It was really nice to get the kind of response we did when we announced the season.
Which one are you looking forward to most?
Ron: Gosh, I have to tell you, To Kill a Mockingbird is so incredible. Alan Sorkin is so incredible— the writing— it just feels like it was yesterday. It’s so timely and perfect. It’s really a very upsetting play but it’s really going to be very meaningful for Baltimore. It feels like it could be written yesterday, honestly. That’s going to be great.
Honestly? I really just love the whole diversity of the season. From Jagged Little Pill to Tina. It’s no Summer, I can tell you that. If anyone saw the Donna Summer musical? It’s nothing like that at all. It’s really just absolutely amazing. I’m excited. I’m really thrilled. I’m glad to get Les Mis back. I feel we all need to revel in someone else’s misery and not our own, so we can do that with Les Mis. Let them be miserable and let me be on the other side of that watching.
We have two— I guess we can call both of them classics, though they are very different— we have, as you just mentioned, Les Miserables and then there’s My Fair Lady.
Ron: Yeah, so this is the Lincoln Center production [of My Fair Lady] that was acclaimed and I’m super excited about it. They just announced that Alan Sorkin is going to do Camelot there. I can only imagine what he’s going to do with it. My Fair Lady was just stunning; it’s a beautiful production so we’re really excited to bring that here. They’re coming back [the classics], every year Broadway has a few of them out, there’s another generation that’s ready to see it. I’m not crazy about the story, to be honest with you. You know, two white men trying to make a poor person ‘more like society.’ It’s a little cringe. So we’ll see how it translates. I really was absolutely in awe of the production; it was very well done, a beautiful production, absolutely beautiful. I’m excited. I think if you’re going to see a My Fair Lady, this is the production to see for sure.
You haven’t mentioned the big icy-cold one…
Ron: Frozen? First of all, I was really very surprised to see that we’re getting it so quickly. Listen, The Lion King did incredible business while it was here, so Disney knows that Baltimore is a viable market. Because we have so many season ticket holders, it really makes us a strong pick. Baltimore becomes a stronger pick. The more a producer looks at a market and says, “oh, gosh they already have 12,000 people loaded in,” it makes that market an easier choice.
This sounds like a knockout season!
Ron: I know and I am really excited! But I’m also a little nervous because Moulin Rouge isn’t there. But I had to save something for the following year (the 2023/2024 season) otherwise I won’t have anything for that season. The hard part too is that if you look at Broadway, there hasn’t been a lot because the pandemic wasn’t a very creative time period and they couldn’t launch things. I’m hoping that there’s a lot in the pipeline. I know they announced that Annie is going to tour and I love Annie but I don’t want to have that on-season. They announced Peter Pan and I love Peter Pan but again…and maybe it’s just that I’ve been in the industry for 30 years so it’s like welcome back to 1994. So I’m a little nervous, but I’m hoping moving forward we’ll see a lot. I’ve heard so many wonderful things about this Michael Jackson musical that’s out [MJ The Musical], that it’s just amazing and the dancing and choreography and the overall production is just stunning. I’m really looking forward to seeing that. I’m really hoping that we start to see a lot of new things come on Broadway and then they can get on the road really quickly. Like Six.
Yes! Six! How incredibly is it that Baltimore is getting that show so fast?
Ron: I’m really thrilled and I am just excited. That show— this whole season— I think this is really one of the beast seasons we have had in 19 years. I look at other markets and I’m just glad we got what we got.
This is the first official season— and I’m going to declare this into the ether so that the universe can accept it as truth— where it’s a full-on, no-cancellation, no-shuffling, season. What is that like for you?
Ron: Can we hope that’s true? Do you know that? Because I would love that crystal ball. Let’s declare it. I certainly hope that that is the case. I’ve got to say, through this whole thing, our subscribers? They stuck with us. We were transparent with them; we held their money for a very long time. We kept lifting the season up and moving it down. We’re basically going now for 36 months from one season to another without any gaps because once Hamilton closes in October [ending the current 21/22 season) we start right up again in November with Tina. It literally is going all the way right through.
That has been so inspiring to me as a person that wasn’t from Baltimore— I’ve been here almost eight years now— but it just is so different than everything else out there. I’ve heard stories of markets that have dropped 30%, 40%. And we dropped 5%. And it was more about the masks than it was about the season. There were always some political people. Just so you know, we are stepping down our Covid protocols as the numbers drop. Now for concerts and comedians, they are mask recommended but not required. For those types of performances we’re allowing you to take drinks back into the theatre. It’s coming down and hopefully soon we won’t need to have vaccination checks and mask requirements because the numbers will be so low there will be no threat. If we have to step it back up, I don’t think there’s an appetite for closures anymore. I think people are going to learn to live with Covid, if it goes on for more than this year, I hope it doesn’t. But if we do, I think we’re going to think of it like the flu and do what you can to protect yourself and that’s it. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
It’s just so nice to be back live in the space. We had a full audience for Dear Evan Hansen, and even with the masks, I felt like life feels a little more normal. Every time we have another show I just feel like we’re on our way back. We’ve got a long road. Even with The Prom, we lost hundreds of thousands of dollars with that. We lost five performances, there were five we had to cancel. It was really a tough hit to us. It’s going to take a long time to recover just from that one. And we tried so hard to get it back. But they’ve had to move around so many times and they’re booked now for the next couple of years so we just weren’t able to get them back.
But it’s great that you’re doing so much to keep everyone accommodated while still keeping everyone enthused about coming back to The Hippodrome for live theatre.
Ron: We are optimistic. And we are keeping our head up high. Yesterday we renewed almost 1100 people on the first day of subscription renewals, which is more than we do during any other time, so I’m just optimistic and hope that everything keeps going in the right direction.
Current subscribers can renew through the end of April and then things will open up for people who would like to become new subscribers, is that right?
Ron: So what we do is we do a renewal period. And the great thing about Baltimore is that we renew at like 80-85%. Now the national average renewal is about 65%. What happens then is that there are not a lot of seats that become available. Everyone says, “I’ve been trying to get an upgrade”, well obviously, someone has to leave their seat in order for an upgrade to happen, and if they don’t leave their seat then there’s less chance to upgrade. So we do the renewal period, when that closes we spend a few weeks looking at all the requests for upgrades of change of date— change from a Tuesday to a Saturday— we pull all of those requests together, we see how long they’ve been with us, see when they renewed, and we take those two dates in mind to help grant requests. If you were a 15-year subscriber that would put you ahead of a 2-year subscriber. We see what’s available, call people and see if they accept what we have available, and then those seats that they’ve just left behind by upgrading go into the mix of new available seats.
It’s done in a very thoughtful way that we can justify. When that is all done and everyone is all good, we open season subscriptions sales to the public. That’s not always a hard date, it’s not definitely x-number of weeks after the renewal period closes because it depends on how many upgrades we end up doing. It’s a really fun process and it’s always nice to give people what they want and keep them happy. When we open up to the public, we keep a waiting list. Yesterday, almost 5,000 people joined the waiting list, which is just super exciting. I think our image of the season was shared 500 or 600 times yesterday. I’m just giddy with excitement over it. I’m really proud and I’ve got such a great team at The Hippodrome. We’re all just chomping at the bit to get back, to keep doing it, and to get past this whole two-year-pandemic-thing for sure.
Absolutely. That is so very incredible! I think we’ve talked about— it’s nine shows coming next season, seven in the season with two optional add-ons— I think we’ve talked about nearly all of them— wait, we didn’t talk about Hadestown.
Ron: You know, I’m going to try to get André De Shields because he’s from Baltimore! I was like “Oh my God, how do I get him to perform a week in Baltimore?” I don’t know if he’ll still be in the New York production, he still is right now [3/30/22 at time of this interview] but if he isn’t wouldn’t it be great to have him come and do that one week in Baltimore? Even if he can’t come perform— if he could just come on opening night and come out at the end or something that would still be really amazing! When he won his Tony, he obviously gave a huge nod to Baltimore being the son of Baltimore.
It sounds like you are just over the moon about this whole season!
Ron: I am telling you— I just— I mean look at it! Six, Hadestown, Frozen, Tina— Tina will blow your mind. It is absolutely incredible. I feel like we did everything we possibly could to make up for what wasn’t our fault, but we wanted to make it up to our city. Honestly, Baltimore did pretty good in that overall. Some markets— like Pittsburgh— lost four or five shows. We only lost one whole show, we only lost To Kill a Mockingbird. And we knew they couldn’t come, we understood that. But then we said, “we have to make sure you’re part of the 2022/2023 season.” And they agreed! Overall, Baltimore did really well and I’m proud of the season this year. I hope that Baltimore is proud of it as well.
How could they not be? I mean, you’ve been saying it this whole phone call— look at this season! And of course, the Pandemic was not your fault, but what a way to help people put it behind them. “Hey, here’s this great season to help you forget the two years where theatre was in permanent limbo!”
Ron: I never hide behind what the truth is. I said our philosophy is transparency; if you want your money back, you’re going to get your money back. We understand, some people lost their jobs, there were lots of horrible things. But if you do hang in there, I think it’s going to be worth it. I was already working on this season about two years ago. I’m already working on 23/24. I’m kind of ahead of that curve. I knew it was going to look really good, if we could just hold on and wait. And here we are!
As they say in Les Mis, “…one day more…”
Ron: Yes! And you know, when they announced that they were bringing it back— I mean, I heard it originally through the grapevine, and then I called Networks and said “please, tell me this is true. And please, please, please tell me it’s happening for us.” You can see some shows more than once and you laugh a lot more or you cry a lot more than the first time, but by the third time it’s like “ok. I get it.” But Les Mis is one of those shows where I can literally watch a different character every time and get something totally different out of it than what I did the last time. It’s really the only show I think I can just really watch over and over and over again. There is just so much packed in there just watch a different character throughout the piece and all the sudden it’s this epiphany of “oh I never understood that, I never got that!” To me it is so worldly and beyond human comprehension. If the universe is like, “this is what I want people to know”, I feel like Les Mis is what you’re supposed to learn. It transcends humanity.
Anything else you’re really excited about that we didn’t talk about yet? Maybe something gorgeous…something…Beautiful?
Ron: Oh! Yes! I’ve been trying to get Beautiful back forever. Beautiful broke the box office record for The Hippodrome when we first had it here. It didn’t last long because then Motown came and broke that record, but I have to tell you, I am mesmerized by Carole King. I follow her on socials, I could listen to her music every single day of my life. It’s a really short run, it’s only three performances, but that’s all we could get. They said, “could you take three?” and I said, “Yes, I’ll take whatever you can give me.”
You have this amazing balance in the season. You’ve got at least two shows that have been here before, and a bunch of brand-new stuff coming through, are you pleased with the balance?
Ron: Five of the shows are still on Broadway! I’m really excited. I feel like we’re really bringing Broadway to Baltimore when there’s five shows that are still up there performing. We couldn’t ask for more. It really is the best.
If you had to sum up this season that you’ve managed to bring to Baltimore in just one word, what would it be?
Ron: Spectacular! There really isn’t a word except it’s perfect! It really hits everything. There’s some meaningful stuff in there. You know, Jagged Little Pill deals with addiction, there’s some really meaningful stuff in— obviously— Les Mis, there’s really meaningful stuff in Hadestown. There’s lessons to be learned, Frozen there’s lessons to be learned. To Kill a Mockingbird is so relevant right now. I feel like there are very human stories inside here, especially Mockingbird. Maybe it will bring us back to kindness. Maybe it will remind us that we have to have gratitude and bring positivity into our lives. The story of Tina, you learn what she’s done to overcome so many obstacles and things that happened to her in her career. I feel like it’s a season of gratitude. #SeasonofGratitude
For more information on how to renew your season subscription or to become a season subscriber click here.
To see what’s currently playing and coming soon to The Hippodrome click here.
