Rockin’ Christmas
For several years now, December has meant the Zachary Scott Theatre Center was having a Rockin’ Christmas Party. This year, though, that may be more than just the title of the theatre’s annual seasonal spectacular. Zach’s current season is off to the kind of powerhouse start that makes you want to get up off your seat and move. The season opener for the mainstage, a Rocky Horror Show retooled for the incoming millennium, was a sensation, selling out enough through its nine-week run to prompt the theatre to revive it for six weeks in the new year (February 24-April 2). Then there’s that little show with the Little Elf. Last year, Zach’s initial production of The Santaland Diaries, adapted from the David Sedaris prose piece, consistently sold out performances. Understandably, the theatre revived it this year. Ticket sales were so brisk that by the time it opened, it had already met 40% of its sales goal, and by the third week of the run, all the scheduled performances were sold out. At the risk of giving Martin Burke, the show’s award-winning star, a stroke, Zach has added matinees on Saturdays through the end of the run. And now there’s the theatre’s second mainstage production, The Flaming Idiots, starring the accomplished comic jugglers by that name, which opens this week and has already sold 50% of its goal. Now, this isn’t the high-tech industry; it ain’t like artistic director Dave Steakley is over on Toomey Road rolling around on overstuffed cash bags with dollar signs on them. But that’s basically why this is still news. This isn’t a private-sector business where a fortune can be scored overnight by mass-producing this year’s hot chip. The arts are still a quirky business, with each project full of its own individual strengths and weaknesses, and success is hard to come by. Even a show that seems like a hit from the get-go — say, a Rocky Horror — doesn’t always pay off the way a theatre expects. Many a theatrical account book is stained with the red ink from an expensive musical that was surefire for packing the seats. So Zach’s rockin’ season is noteworthy and bodes well for the theatre as it heads into the part of its season with the less showy and more obscure dramatic material, pieces like The America Play, by Suzan-Lori Parks, and An Almost Holy Picture, by Heather MacDonald.
By the way, don’t be mystified if you come across that Rockin’ Christmas Party title on the marquee of some theatre in a far-flung locale. That’s all part of the Zach Plan for World Domination. Steakley and Zach have begun to market the show — which, while inspired by the well-known revue Beehive, was a fully Zach-created show — to theatres as an alternative to more well-worn Yuletide material. The first big test for the theatre was developing a production for the American Heartland Theatre in Kansas City. Team Zach designed, cast, and rehearsed a show there that opened two days after Halloween and so far has pulled in $400,000 for the KC theatre. Steakley has said that two more theatres have already expressed interest in mounting the show next year, and the theatre is inviting representatives from other regional playhouses to pay a visit to Austin this month to check out Zach’s version at the Paramount and see for themselves how well the show goes over. Pretty soon, this Rockin’ Christmas Party could be coast-to-coast. For more information, call Zach at 476-0541.
This article appears in December 10 • 1999.