As Pittsburgh continues efforts to rebound from the pandemic, the Richard King Mellon Foundation is giving eight grants totaling $2.69 million to support the performing arts in Downtown.
“This funding will give these organizations capital to take risks and test creative ideas that have the potential to engage new audiences, and to inspire traditional audiences to return Downtown,” Sam Reiman, the foundation’s director, said in a Monday, Feb. 26, press release.
Grants of $500,000 each were awarded to Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, Pittsburgh Opera, Pittsburgh Public Theater and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Three grants totaling $475,000 were awarded to the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust for studies on organizational decision-making, shared services and Downtown real estate activation. Carnegie Mellon University was awarded $215,000 to develop a strategic plan to attract theatrical artists to Pittsburgh.
“We are flattered and humbled not just that they recognize the scope of the challenges that local arts organizations like ours are facing these days, but they believe enough in our proposed projects to fund them to help address those problems,” says Chris Cox, the opera’s director of marketing and communications.
Though the grants were announced on Monday, the Pittsburgh Opera had access to the funds earlier this year to launch its first program on Monday, Feb. 12: a free ride-share service to and from shows at the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts.
“We know from research — both quantitative research studies as well as qualitative feedback from patrons — that for some segments of the population, transportation to get to the theater Downtown is a barrier to attending our performances,” Cox says. “Our thought was, why don’t we provide free Uber vouchers for some of our patrons … to help them literally get door-to-door car service to and from the theater.”
The vouchers, which are a free add-on when booking tickets, add $60 worth of funds to the patron’s Uber account. The ride-share program uses about $72,000 of the organization’s $500,000 grant.
Cox adds that the service comes with parameters, activating and expiring a few hours before and after the concert. The vouchers also require the rider to be dropped off or picked up within a half mile of the Benedum Center, located on the corner of 7th Street and Penn Avenue.
“We intentionally built in a cushion both geographically of where the ride needs to start and end, as well as what times you can use it,” Cox says. “There’s no buying a $15 opera ticket, getting $60 worth of Uber vouchers, taking it to the airport and skipping the show.”
The R.K. Mellon grant will also fund a free Downtown concert in late summer. The program is similar in concept to the opera’s existing Market Square concerts, but it will be bigger in scale — featuring more vocalists and the opera’s orchestra.
Cox says more initiatives beyond these two are in the works but are not ready to be announced.
CMU’s Rick Edinger, an associate professor of musical theater, says the university is proposing the creation of a center for new theatrical work. Edinger says that when budgets are being minimized, programming for new work development is slashed first because its longer, iterative process does not produce as much immediate revenue.
“There are stages of development in terms of writing, creating new design for it, rewriting, workshopping that often theaters, particularly our regional houses, don’t always have the … development resources to really give a new piece its due course,” Edinger says.
“It’s basically trying to offer the academic space as a space for collaboration — both for writers, directors, actors and designers within our school, but also to build relationships with external partners who are also developing new work, like Pittsburgh [Civic Light Opera] or Pittsburgh Public Theater.”
Edinger’s ultimate hope is that the center will get audiences excited to participate in the development of new art.
“But audiences have to understand what they’re seeing — they’re seeing an imperfect version of the thing we’re trying to perfect, and it’s through their participation and feedback that we can make the piece better,” Edinger says.
“If they see ‘Hamilton’ outside of New York before it becomes ‘Hamilton, the multimillion-dollar thing,’ that’s something that’s exciting … that’s what we’re hoping to offer to the space.”
This article previously stated the opera’s rideshare program provided transportation to its Strip District house. It has been updated to reflect that the rideshare program is only available for shows at the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts. NEXTpittsburgh regrets this error.