Norm Easterbrook on Columbus: ‘It’s a far less homogeneous community than what I thought’

Norm Easterbook sees Columbus through fresh eyes and a lens filtered by a life in the arts community.

Easterbrook, a native of a small town in upstate New York, became the executive director and chief executive officer of the RiverCenter for the Performing Arts in downtown Columbus about 18 months ago.

What he has seen here has impressed him. Recently, he sat down with Ledger-Enquirer senior reporter Chuck Williams and chief photographer Mike Haskey to discuss the RiverCenter, Columbus and the local arts community.

Here are excerpts of that conversation, edited for length and clarity:

Q: You’ve been in Columbus now for going on a year and a half. Has there been anything about Columbus that has surprised you as you’ve gotten to know the city?

A: I’m surprised — I knew what a giving community it was — but I was surprised to learn what a varied community it is. My knowledge of Columbus before we came here (was) that it was just really basically a military town and that was it.

But when we got settled in to realize all the wonderfully vital activity that goes on in our uptown area — in our midtown area — that was the surprising part of it. It was really like having these wonderful small little hamlets or districts, if you will, of shops and wonderful neighborhoods to live in, and that was surprising to me.

It’s a far less homogeneous community than what I thought it was in moving here. Does that make sense?

Q: How does this compare in the arts to the other places you have lived?

A: Certainly the arts community is far more vibrant than the other areas in which I’ve lived. Now, Tallahassee has grown over the years and they’ve got a terrifically vibrant art community there. But you mentioned the biggies, OK, but there’s also this wonderful underpinning of individual visual artists, of crafts people, groups of people coming together to do graphic art and things like that.

So there really is a more of a solid community here than other communities in which I’ve lived. And it’s a community that exists on all levels, from the individuals all the way through to the larger, more visible institutions like RiverCenter and (Columbus State University) and the Springer (Opera House) — all of them terrific institutions with great legacies.

Q: As you travel in your circles, your industry, when you tell people what’s here, is that surprising to them?

A: It’s very surprising, and it’s surprising in the sense we’re here sitting in a place that surprises everyone — that a community like Columbus, that in some ways is not as much on the beaten pathway as other cities, it’s got a facility such as this.

When people hear about our uptown district and about our midtown district and how the arts are woven into both of those areas, when they hear about the Liberty Theater, and all of the wonderful things happening in our community, they’re really quite envious. They don’t know that that’s going on.

Q: Is that easier for an outsider like you coming in to recognize, sing your song more loudly, than people who have watched this grow over 30 years?

A: Absolutely, it absolutely is. When you’re in the community and you have these things growing up around you, it’s a very slow process. Things happen around here that you don’t notice. Then all of a sudden they’re a reality in your community, but you have been watching those things build kind of subconsciously over the years, and it’s not as much as a surprise to you.

Now when this facility opened, of course, there was a big splash. RiverCenter was done and there were other projects that were done around the community. That’s quite a different thing. The older that experience gets, the more in the history it gets, you kind of get use to it.

Q: Do you take it for granted?

A: I don’t think the community takes it for granted. What I can say, what I’ve also noticed, when there’s been a need, when there’s been an issue that needs to be addressed, yes, probably folks are surprised that that issue might exist. But we all put our heads together and we fix it and we understand the right action we need to take.

Q: Can you give me an example of one of those issues?

A: Well, I think probably one of the most visible examples, and something we need to be careful with at RiverCenter, was the discussion last year around hotel/motel tax. That to me was a discussion that was natural. If there’s a funding source that could have possibly helped us solve some issues for the city, it makes perfect sense to look at what funding sources are available so the city can operate and do what it needs to do.

But what I found in that process is that when we realized there was some discussion about taking some funds away from the city from RiverCenter, a lot of folks came together and had a discussion about how important that source of funding was for RiverCenter. We had a discussion and an analysis of were we really being responsible with those funds and how were we using those funds?

So we restarted, we began that conversation again where we were awakened to the awareness of how important this model is to the success of RiverCenter, and I think we all came together of one accord and said no, this is not a pathway that we should go, we should choose another pathway.

... I think that speaks very highly of our local leadership.

Q: Is public funding necessary for the arts?

A: I think it is on a variety of different levels. In the arts we are asked and we are called to do things to draw our community together. We’re often called upon to help our communities heal. We’re often called upon to provide entertainment in our communities. We are not the reason why a corporation might move to our area, but we are one of the very sharp arrows in the arsenal that we shoot at that topic.

And we could not do that really without public funding. The biggest thing public funding does for the arts is it speaks for the community and says the arts and culture are important to us — important enough that we are going to put some of our tax dollars, our hard earned money, behind this so they can exist in our community.

Q: Talk about the programming of this building. You were at the University of Mississippi, at the Ford Center, right?

A: I’m going to say it’s a little bit easier to program because the market is much larger than the market was in Oxford. This facility is shared with Columbus State University through our relationship with Schwob School of Music. That’s a partnership that’s really unique that we should not pass over. That’s kind of what started this project and landed it downtown in the first place.

CSU through Schwob School of Music shares in the responsibility of the maintenance and upkeep of this facility. They contribute to that equally to match our contribution to it. So we work very, very closely together.

What we do with RiverCenter, Inc., is not purely a university environment, so we don’t have the response of faculty, necessarily, or to students. That part’s already being taken care of through Columbus State University and through Schwob School of Music.

So that frees up RiverCenter, Inc., to be a little bit more intentional about programming for the general community, so you’ve got a larger market. We can focus our resources on kind of what happens in the building in the evening, if you will, where Schwob School of Music kind of stops functioning in the daytime when the sun goes down. RiverCenter comes in with the shows we bring in and the music that we bring in as well.

Q: One of the things that you don’t realize if you’re not downtown, that is that if you have something like “Seussical” here, you have shows leading up to that during the morning and it’s a school bus traffic jam down here. How important is it to do those where you bring kids in from surrounding schools?

A: It’s critical to their success. The education program for us is very, very important to RiverCenter. From RiverCenter’s singular perspective, it helps us build an audience. It connects us more with the community. Those kids go home and they talk about their experience at RiverCenter. ...

We contribute to the educational experience of the children in our community and I’ve got a really close relationship with the school board and the school system. They’ve been really, really responsive to our programs.

So what many people probably may not know that RiverCenter has done, we had a teachers institute in the beginning of the year, right before school opened, where the kindergarten teachers and their paraprofessionals came to a session that was sponsored by RiverCenter. They learned through experts from the Kennedy Center, from the Woodruff Arts Center and Wolf Trap (Foundation for the Performing Arts) about how to use the programming in RiverCenter in their classroom.

Q: The Muscogee County School District is about to open an arts academy. Do you think that’s a good thing for the city?

A: Yeah, I do, I do. You’ve got a number of young people in the school system that ... we may find that their calling may not be in the subject matter that we focus on now in the classroom. I think a magnet school and a school that focuses on the performing arts, I mean, if that gives even just one kid the opportunity to excel in an area where they might not have been able to excel were it not for that school, I think it’s worth doing.

I think we’re going to see many more kids be served very well by that magnet school.

Q: When you look at your career path, you have merged the business side — CEO of a multi-million dollar enterprise — with the arts side. Could you be as successful on the business side if you didn’t have the arts framework?

A: I don’t think so. I really don’t think so. For me and the work that I do, it requires speaking in front of people a lot, which is a skill that folks have got to have. I know it sounds so terribly basic, but it also helps your thought process. You can approach a problem in a variety of different ways.

You know how to collaborate with people. You know how to fail, OK? You know that if you drop a line you have got to have enough confidence in yourself and you’ve got to know the person next to you to have enough confidence in them that they’re going to help you out.

Q: What drew you to the arts as a high school and college kid?

A: It’s about the only thing I could do.

Q: Obviously, that’s not true.

A: I had parents that were thoughtful enough, since I lived in the country, they understood that I had to have other things to do than sit around in my room or stare out the window.

So at a very early age they kind of looked at me and said, “You know, you need to do something. You can sing, you can play the piano or you can dance.” In that era, boys didn’t dance and we really didn’t have a piano, so the idea was to sing. At a very early age I started taking singing lessons and that kind of opened the world for me and I realized that was something I was interested in.

One of my most memorable experiences is when my parents saved their pennies and we went to see “Aida” at the Metropolitan Opera years and years and years ago. We sat right in front of the broadcast booth with Milton Cross behind us and I just loved it.

I went home and I made out of shoe boxes ... my grandparents lived in Brooklyn so when we got back to their house I took shoe boxes and kind of rebuilt the set that I saw. I think they realized I was kind of fixed on that.

Q: A couple of weeks ago we had the thespian conference, ThesCon, here — 5,000 high school students from all over Georgia. When you saw all of those kids in your building throughout the streets of downtown, what did you see?

A: They are our future. It was reported what the economic impact was. I think ... it was $1.7 million. What I saw was the real keen realization ... of what can happen when a community works together, when Columbus State University works together with the Convention and Visitor Bureau, with the Springer Opera House, when we’ve got uptown clicking and it works together with everybody else. That’s how we can accommodate those kids. That’s a testimony of success for the Columbus community.

And the conference is scheduled to grow. It’s going to grow in number. So we’re meeting next week to begin work for next year’s conference. So that was one thing that I saw, that none of that could have happened without any of those partners. If anyone stepped out of that, it could not happen.

Q: What do you say to the average person in Columbus that lost their favorite table at the coffee shop or had an hour wait at the lunch line at one of their favorite places?

A: Thank you so much for making it possible for these kids to come to our community. In reality, yeah, there’s inconvenience that you suffer and we’re not unconcerned about that either.

I would just want to remind everyone that let’s talk about the obvious economic impact of it — we keep going back to that.

Q: Columbus gets the rap among promoters that it was always considered to be a walk-up town. It was very difficult to book shows because people would not buy in advance. What’s your experience?

A: I don’t think it’s changed. That’s still the circumstance and I don’t think that’s distinctive to Columbus, I really don’t. It’s that way really more and more across the nation. In fact, there are studies that have come back that have said people will pay a premium for the privilege of being able to purchase their seat at the last minute and get what they want.

So that’s a trend that’s happening everywhere. It does make promoters nervous. It makes us nervous. I mean, we’re selecting our season right now for next year and we’re looking at the investment that we’re making and it really is very nerve-racking. Is this title going to work for us? Do we do it on a Monday or a Tuesday or a Friday or a Thursday in the fall? Or on a Saturday? It’s very agonizing to make these decisions for the very reason that generally the business is a last-minute business.

Now we’re going to try to do some things from the marketing perspective to encourage more advanced sales, but that’s a perennial problem. But I wouldn’t necessarily say right now that Columbus is the only community feeling that. It is certainly not feeling it anymore than any other community would be.

Q: Is the Broadway series important to a building like this?

A: It’s very important, yeah. It’s important for a couple of reasons. It’s attractive to our corporate sponsors. It’s really nice because they’re recognizable titles. The Broadway series draws very well and the other thing is it’s important to our community because if you can do kind of a comparative look at the ticket prices in Columbus and compare them to other major markets, in many cases we are 50 percent of the average ticket price in other markets.

Q: Does this place operate as smoothly as it does without the volunteers?

A: No, no, and that’s why I thank them every time I come up on the stage. We really couldn’t function without the volunteer support. And they help us in so many different ways.

When somebody volunteers their time, they’re generally happy and eager to come to volunteer when it comes to the theater. When you go through a whole day when we’ve been putting the show up on the stage and doing our regular jobs, we have a whole wave of people that come in that are smiling faces and just thrilled to say, “Welcome to RiverCenter.”

We’ve got tremendous skill sets in our volunteers. We’ve got folks that are retired school teachers, retired police officers. I mean, the list goes on and on: retired physicians, retired EMS folks or working EMS folks, they’re not all retired. So we’ve got a tremendous number of skill sets that we can employ with our volunteers.

Then also, when you’ve got people that are giving of their time, it engenders a certain respect. The decorum is different in the facility. It’s friendlier, there’s more of a community spirit. And if you’re asked to get up and move to the correct seat, you’re not going to push back on a volunteer that’s giving their time — come on!

This story was originally published February 25, 2017 at 2:57 PM with the headline "Norm Easterbrook on Columbus: ‘It’s a far less homogeneous community than what I thought’."