Walk into almost any theater for almost any play, and you’ll see the obvious: Millennials, aged 29 to 41, are MIA.
Missing in Audience, or maybe, Millennials Intentionally Absent.
“You get your students and your young professionals, and you get your empty nesters, but what happened to the people with families?” asks Leigh Goldenberg, managing director at The Wilma Theater.
Across the street, at the Philadelphia Theatre Company, co-artistic director Tyler Dobrowsky noticed the same thing. That’s why both the Philadelphia Theatre Company and the Wilma are offering childcare at one weekend matinee performance per show.
“You absolutely see a drop-off from 30s to 50s,” Dobrowsky said. The Baby Boomers come and “sometimes you get young folks on a date or young people who really want to see theater.
“When you have a kid, you have so many additional responsibilities. It can be difficult to find the time, the extra money, and the energy to go to the theater,” he said. He and his wife, co-artistic director Tabai Magar, have a young son, Bowen, born last year.
Both theaters have contracted with organizations specializing in children’s theater who are not only watching the kids during showtime, but also providing a theatrical experience for them with performances and/or workshops in dance, music, acting and art.
Care providers are theater professionals who have the requisite child clearances, both companies said. Registration is advised, as both theaters have caps on the number of children who can be accommodated.
Goldenberg described the outreach to parents as part of a fairly recent trend by theaters to make themselves more welcoming to a wider range of people. Increasingly, she noted, theaters are, for example, finding ways to accommodate people on the autism spectrum, or who have low vision. Parents are another group.
In Philadelphia, one of four residents is a Millennial, now in the height of childbearing years. They comprise the city’s largest generational group, numbering 421,426 in 2022, followed by Gen Z, with 330,340 and growing. Meanwhile, the Boomer theater crowd is declining, down to 280,366 from 336,615 in 2012, according to statistics from the National Institutes of Health.
There’s a market for theater childcare, Goldenberg said.
“We see a lot of people participating in the arts as a family. The children’s shows at the Arden are popular,” she said. “People go to the zoo. People go to the museum. It’s not that they stop participating in the arts when they have kids. But they stop going to adult shows because, what do you do with your kids?”
It can be an expensive night out, she noted. There’s the cost of the tickets, and a drink or dessert afterwards. Add babysitting at $15 to $20 an hour, plus a tip, at roughly $80 for a four-hour night out. It can strain, or rupture, the budget.
Childcare is free at the Philadelphia Theatre Company, with services provided by Philly Children’s Theatre, a nonprofit that stages shows for children in neighborhoods around the city.
The group ran Philadelphia Theatre Company’s first childcare matinee for “La Egoísta” in October. “The parents were very appreciative. The kids were happy, and the parents were happy that they had a safe place. They know [their kids] are getting an arts experience as well,” said Sarah Gordin, founder and artistic director.
Parents drop off their kids before the show and collect them afterwards. The children, ages 5 through 12, hang out in refurbished studio space on an upper floor at the theater.
Wilma’s program costs $30 for the first child in a family and $20 for each sibling, for children who are “confident potty users,” ages 3 and up.
Music Theatre Philly, a nonprofit organization that runs theater classes and camps for young people, offers the matinee program at its headquarters at the Nest, an early learning center at 13th and Locust streets, two blocks from the Wilma.
A lasting gift
Music Theatre Philly’s partnership with Wilma was engineered by the late theater publicist Carrie Gorn, whose sudden death on Jan. 29 shook the theater community.
Gorn’s daughter, Rosalind, was performing in Music Theatre Philly’s “Chicago” at the University of the Arts’ Arts Bank building on the very day the university announced its closure. Gorn, true to form, figured out how to solve everybody’s problem – Music Theatre’s need for a stage and Wilma’s fledgling interest in providing childcare and a theater experience.
She grabbed Tim Popp, Music Theatre’s executive director, in the lobby and later connected him and co-founder Mindy Dougherty Baiada to Goldenberg and Lindsay Smiling, one of Wilma’s three co-artistic directors. Both Goldenberg and Smiling have young children.
The four met in Wilma’s lobby café and Music Theatre ended up providing childcare at Wilma’s “The Comeuppance” in the fall.
As much as offering childcare has marketing potential for the Wilma, the partnership, Popp hopes, will also attract more families to Music Theatre Philly’s programs, which in turn, he said, will grow audiences for theaters.
“Once your kid develops a passion for something, parents have to know about it,” he said. “Kids are dragging their parents to the shows. Parents are discovering theater thanks to their kids.”
FYI
Wilma Childcare Matinee: Feb. 22, 1:30 p.m. at Music Theatre Philly’s Nest, 1301 Locust St., Phila. for the 2 p.m. show of “The Half-God of Rainfall,” Feb. 11-March 2, The Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St., Phila. 215-546-7824.
Philadelphia Theatre Co. Childcare Matinee: March 2, 3 p.m. at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, 480 S. Broad St., for “Night Side Songs,” Feb. 21-March 9, 215-985-0420.
