A vision for the Regent

The Monarch on Main looks to a post-COVID future

When Alexandra Seay took on the position of general manager at the Regent Theatre in December 2019, she brought a wealth of experience as a theatre and film director on the art side, and in marketing and project management on the business side. “This job was an opportunity to bring those things together in a really exciting way that I never really thought I’d be doing,” she said. But just three months into the job, she suddenly found herself in uncharted territory as emergency measures under the COVID-19 pandemic forced the Regent to close its doors on March 16, 2020. “I did not know what was going to happen. Nobody did, nobody had that crystal ball. The feeling was maybe we’ll just close for a month, so we’ll hold our breath and wait. But by the time May rolled around, we couldn’t wait any longer, so we really had to start thinking hard and fast about how we were going to move with the times, because waiting was not an option.” With a reopening date still uncertain, the theatre stands to lose 80 per cent of its projected revenue for the year. “The situation has forced us to re-evaluate where our revenue stream is coming from. COVID actually in many ways accelerated ideas that were already there. One of those ideas was the need to expand our audience. This has given us the opportunity to increase our access. With our new hybrid programming model, it allows us to go into people’s homes. Up to now, the proposition was ‘Come to us here in the middle of downtown Picton to engage with what we have to offer,’ whereas now we can say, ‘We’re going to come to you with what we have to offer.’ It’s a different delivery mechanism than we ever could have imagined, pre- COVID, but the objective is the same as before, which is to broaden our audience.”

Regent Theatre manager Alexandra Seay stands in front of teh storied building on Picton Main Street. The theatre remains closed to the public during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The Regent is now streaming movies so that people can watch them from home. The selection is limited and the audience uptake has not been great, which is a common experience for many other theatres that are offering movie streams. “Very few [theatres] are even close to the returns that they would be getting on live shows. The programming that is available is a bit more indie and art-house than what is traditionally shown on our screen, apart from Cinefest and County Docs, so I understand how our audience might be a little more tentative about engaging with it,” said Seay. She does encourage people to stream the next couple of films coming up. “Please watch Mr. Topaze, the lost Peter Sellers film, and The Killing Floor, which is a film from the ‘80s that has just been re-released in light of Black Lives Matter, and it’s a topical film.” Seay is grateful for a recent $40,000 grant from the municipality that will allow the theatre to do more hybrid streaming. “It allows us to equip ourselves to move forward, and without it there would be no way forward, but we still have to find a way of making up our shortfall,” she added.

The theatre board and the fundraising committee are working on ways to move the theatre forward, and Seay said that more news on that front will be coming soon. “Our streaming model is a way of stabilizing ticket sales, once we can generate them again. But we also have to look further afield. Right now we are supported by members, who can’t come to the theatre. By sponsors who depend on advertising, which we can’t provide. And by generous donors. So this has opened doors to us as an organization to do something we haven’t really done in the past, which is to apply for operational funding from the provincial and federal governments, and investigate other private and public sector fundraising opportunities. Moving forward over the next couple of months is going to be a challenge. I can’t sugar-coat that. We’ve taken advantage of all the wage subsidies that are available, but until we can generate revenue it’s going to be a challenge.” The Regent is looking at collaborating with other venues, and in particular with the Mustang Drive-in. One idea is to host a band—or an event like the Jazz Festival—on the Regent stage and stream it to the drive-in as well as to people at home. “We’re exploring options for yearround programming. Everything is in the idea phase right now, but there’s lots of possibilities,” said Seay. In the meantime, the Regent has trimmed its operating cost as much as possible. Staff have been laid off, Seay herself has taken a pay cut, and the lights and air conditioning have been turned off to save energy costs.

Seay has been heartened by the level of the support she and the theatre have received from the community. “Before COVID and after COVID, there’s one thing that has stayed the same, and that is the enormous sense of community and goodwill around this place, this building, the Regent Theatre. That community is our members, our volunteers, but also members of the public, people who pass by on the street for whom the Regent plays a role in their lives. Those people have made opportunities to tell us how much the Regent means to them, and to share stories from their childhood about how they remember coming to the Regent. That sense of community has been so overwhelming to me, and I wasn’t expecting it when I came here, and the reception I’ve received here has been really supportive,” she said. “I can’t let the Regent die on my watch, that’s for sure. I’m a hundred and twenty per cent committed to making sure that doesn’t happen. In my background as a director, my job was to communicate a vision and engage a team in a vision. When I joined the Regent, there was a reason more than there was a vision— we needed to preserve something that was already here—but what the future looked like was a little bit unclear. Now we have been forced to have a really clear vision for the future, and I’m very energized by it. This is a vision that I will fight for.”