The Formula: Subscribe Now!

If Boston manages to complete a palace of culture or two, its next problem will be to find people to fill the seats. Opening the box office windows is not enough. Theater, dance, opera and musical companies throughout the country are rapidly discovering that survival means subscriptions. Patrons who will pay for four or five performances well in advance mean, quite literally, money in the bank, and a performing group has the security of knowing that it will have an audience for experimental works, not just Pavarotti or Horowitz. Admits Ruth Hider, New York City Opera director of operations: "We couldn't survive without a subscription audience."

The subscription drive has become another of the fine arts, and there are few if any practitioners more polished than the Chicago Lyric Opera's pressagent, Danny Newman. "There's no arts boom in America today," says Newman, 60. "There's only a subscription boom." Newman should know. He has made the "fickle" single-ticket buyer expendable in many American cities. As a consultant to the Ford Foundation since 1961, he has criss-crossed the country teaching theater companies how to set up subscription drives. His formula: subscribe now. Those two words are blazoned on the brochures announcing the schedules of thousands of performing companies. Sometimes there is a hinted threat: subscribe by June 15 or subscribe before bookings close. Large-scale mailings are backed by telephone solicitations or offers of discounted tickets. In his book, Subscribe Now!, Newman offers "infantry tactics" for the "conversion of the single-ticket buyers." They include cocktail parties, the use of private Christmas card mailing lists and even door-to-door canvassing.

Newman's hard-sell tactics have turned off some of the patrons who are most knowledgeable about the arts. His prose can be flamboyant or plain trashy. He once billed Cavalleria Rusticana as "hot-blooded romance, illicit love and violent vengeance, Sicilian style." But Newman is a superflack, not a philistine. He wants to make culture a pervasive American institution.

The results of his campaign are impressive. Hundreds of companies, including the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the St. Louis Symphony, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Houston Grand Opera and the New York City Ballet, have had increases of 100% or more since Newman started advising them. The Louisville Ballet has already sold out the up coming fall season with 7,000 subscribers and 2,000 more on a waiting list. Says General Manager Michael Durham: "His book is our bible."

Last month Newman was in Boston pepping up Sarah Caldwell. Specifically, he advised her on the proper timing of the release of 450,000 brochures between now and the beginning of the 1980 season. He urged pushing harder to get renewals with a major telephone campaign. "Back to fundamentals. Boston is a campus-rich town, so I suggested increased efforts there -- on both the student and faculty levels." Then he flew to Israel, where he reviewed sales programs. This week it is off to Canada on a four-city tour of subscription checkups. But charity begins at home. Newman has managed to help the Chicago Lyric Opera, which he has promoted for 25 years, to raise more than $3 million a year. "We have 14,000 contributors at the Lyric Opera," he notes. "Instead of four tycoons."

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