A Show for all Seasons

Irving Berlin's classic show tune There's No Business Like Show Business, written for Annie Get Your Gun, will forever be tied to that musical and subsequent movie. But the ditty would also serve as an appropriate theme song for Will Prather, executive producer and an owner of the Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre in Fort Myers.

The Broadway Palm has been entertaining Southwest Floridians since October of 1993, when it opened with a production of Me and My Girl, and Prather has been at the helm from the beginning. Today the theater employs a staff of 125, brings in nearly $6 million in annual gross revenues, and hosts some 175,000 people a year in its main theater and 90-seat Off Broadway Palm Theatre.

Aside from theatrical shows, the building serves as a popular meeting venue for various community organizations, making the Broadway Palm a hybrid operation that serves as a successful business in all seasons.

The Early Stage

Prather grew up in the dinner theater world, working as everything from a busboy to food and beverage manager at his parents' Dutch Apple Dinner Theatre in Lancaster, Pa. "The joke is that I came out of the womb and onto the stage," he says. After his parents purchased a retirement property on Sanibel, the family decided that Southwest Florida would be a great place for a second theater. So Prather loaded up his car and moved to the Sunshine State to run the new operation.

The family originally wanted to buy a piece of land and build a freestanding theater, but decided instead to renovate a former Publix supermarket at Royal Palm Square in Fort Myers. About $1.5 million later, the theater was ready to open. According to Prather, it was long overdue.

"We saw the writing on the wall and felt there was a significant market of opportunity for what we do," he says.

Though the Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall had recently opened nearby, the only other dinner theater in the vicinity was in Naples. Prather believed the Broadway Palm could attract not only residents of the Fort Myers area but also folks in neighboring communities. The theater's location was a key component of that belief: Located on Colonial Boulevard almost at the base of the Midpoint Memorial Bridge (built just a couple of years after Broadway Palm opened), the theater is easily accessible to people living in Cape Coral, and it's just a few miles from U.S. 41 and I-75 for those coming from Punta Gorda, Port Charlotte and other locales to the north.

Thirteen years later, it's clear that the Prather family assessed the market correctly. The Broadway Palm Theatre filled a niche in the Fort Myers area, says Louise Senneff, executive director of the Lee County Alliance for the Arts. "They are providing something for this community that no one else is, and they do it well."

That's the ticket

The Broadway Palm has experienced audience growth every year but one of its existence and boasts annual occupancy rates of about 80 percent. Prather attributes some of that growth to the theater's willingness to adapt to changing times.

"We sensed that there was going to be a changing demographic," Prather says, referring to the emergence of the baby boom generation. "My associates-other people in the industry-were in the early to mid 1990s still focused on producing the same old dinner theater that had been produced for many years. But we sensed that if we did not start changing what we produce, we would find ourselves with a declining audience base."

So in addition to the classics, the Broadway Palm also started staging newer shows, including The Civil War, Jekyll & Hyde and Miss Saigon-what Prather describes as "cutting-edge productions not really associated with a dinner-theater audience." This foray into bolder material has paid off. A recent production of Cats was the theater's best-attended show ever.

Unlike a lot of its competitors, the Broadway Palm operates 52 weeks a year, keeping seats filled in the summer months with such family-friendly fare as Beauty and the Beast.

"We turned lemons into lemonade," Prather says. "Summer used to be our most challenging time. But now that we're focused on developing the summer family audience, we have some of our highest attendances during the summer months."

In addition to the Broadway Palm and Dutch Apple, the Prather Family of Theatres also includes the Broadway Palm West Dinner Theatre in Mesa, Ariz. Operating a trio of theaters rather than just one is a big plus, according to Will Prather, who oversees all three.

"Because we are such a large operator of theaters around the country, we're able to amortize some of our production costs," he says. "We can spend $100,000 on a show and run it for 20 to 24 weeks between all three of our theaters. By increasing our economies of scale we have been able to manage our costs better than most theaters. It's given us a competitive edge."

The Broadway Palm also stays competitive by continually looking ahead. "We have never rested on our laurels," says Prather. "You cannot sit back. We are constantly pushing ourselves to find the next hit." To do so, Prather and his management team make trips to New York City, attend conferences and educate themselves on what's worked and what hasn't, both at their own theaters and at other theaters across the country.

Theater of operations

Despite all the success, challenges still remain, including the dreaded "H" word-hurricanes. "There's about a quarter-of-a-million-dollar effect on my business every time one of those comes through," Prather says. "The last thing you think about is going out and being entertained when you have a hurricane bearing down. But we have a novel approach: It's business as usual. We cannot sit back and be scared of these things. We have to stay focused and stay open as much as we can."

The Broadway Palm escaped major damage when hurricanes Charley and Wilma blew through. Wilma knocked down the theater's neon sign, but Prather calls that "a blessing in disguise" because it was time for a new one anyway.

Like many other businesses in the area, Prather has experienced rising costs. "We have to be very careful," he says. "We are a price-sensitive business. There's only so much we can pass along to the consumer. So a lot of that means going back and managing our costs." The area's low unemployment rate means it's also hard for the theater to find good employees to fill some entry-level and service positions. Prather and his staff try to sell the theater's fun, ever-changing environment to applicants. "It's not your normal, run-of-the-mill job," he says.

In addition to its full slate of theatrical productions, the Broadway Palm has also become a popular Southwest Florida meeting and event venue, hosting functions for organizations ranging from United Way of Lee County to the county's school district. Prather admits that he started positioning the Broadway Palm as an event site in order to expose more people to the theater, but it has become a great way to keep the facility busy. That portion of the operation pulls in annual gross revenues of around $300,000. "It's turned us into more of an entertainment complex," says Prather.

"We've been very happy with it," says Jennifer Dunn, communications manager for the Lee County Economic Development Office, whose Horizon Council has held annual meetings there. "You're able to accommodate a good number of people, and it's great if you're going to do a presentation where you need a stage and you've got several speakers."

"The venue is [in] a central location, which works perfectly for us because we draw members from Lee, Collier and Charlotte counties-not to mention that the service and food are exceptional, and they are very accommodating," says Nancy McCarthy, president of the Southwest Florida chapter of the Florida Public Relations Association, which has been holding lunch meetings at the Broadway Palm for the past 10 years.

As an active member of the community, Prather is involved with many of the nonprofits that hold events at the theater, which has further helped to raise its profile in Southwest Florida. Prather serves on the board of directors for the Alliance for the Arts and on the board of trustees for the Southwest Florida Community Foundation. He's also always willing to help raise funds for organizations near and dear to his heart, especially those in the arts.

"The community has always been very well integrated with what we do here," he says. "I believe very strongly in giving back, and by being a leader in the community, it opens additional doors.

"My ability to raise money, particularly for the arts, is enhanced by my position in the community."

"Will Prather is the kind of person who's always looking out for everyone else's interests as well as his own," says Alliance for the Arts' Senneff. "He sees opportunities and he goes for them. That represents the Broadway Palm very well, but he's also a community activist."

Yet Prather has also seen the downside to being passionate about certain causes. He admits that when it became public knowledge that he is a Democrat-he's an active supporter of Southwest Florida's minority political party-it hurt business, with some people actually canceling their theater subscriptions.