nTelos Pavilion full of promise and empty seats

PORTSMOUTH

Under the iconic white tent of the nTelos Pavilion, Etta James kicked off this year’s concert season last month belting out her signature R&B songs with her traditional gusto .

But the more-than-half-empty amphitheater sang another tune: On average, James and other performers at nTelos Pavilion sell only about 55 percent of the tickets they would at another similar-sized venue.

That’s not the only troubling statistic for the city-owned, 6,500-seat concert pavilion. Overall, paid attendance dropped last season. Only one concert has been booked for May. N one is announced so far for June, which is traditionally one of the busiest months of the summer concert season.

Two years ago, City Council members crowed that the troubled amphitheater’s problems – a roof destroyed by a hurricane and a years-long fight with the venue’s previous management – were finally behind them.

Now, they say they have new concerns that the city’s $13 million investment sits dark too

often on summer nights and isn’t crowded enough when shows come to town.

“It’s a diamond in the rough, it’s just not being used to its full potential,” said Councilman Bill Moody Jr., who raised the issue of the pavilion’s sparse schedule at a recent council meeting. “It’s too pretty, too unique of a facility to be underutilized.”

The attendance woes are the latest in a long string of setbacks for the venue. When the amphitheater opened in 2001, city leaders hoped it would drive downtown business and attract visitors from across the region.

In its first full season, the amphitheater hosted 41 concerts, including a number of sold-out shows that brought thousands downtown.

But in late 2003, Hurricane Isabel ripped the fiberglass roof off the facility, and Portsmouth had to sue the roof’s designers to pay for repairs. The next year, city officials acknowledged that no one had been tracking performance at the venue, and they had no idea how it was doing financially.

Eventually, the city and the facility’s prior management company, Harbor Center Joint Venture, agreed that both sides had breached the amphitheater’s operating agreement. The city dropped the old managers and hired IMG, promising that the new company would turn things around. The two co-owners of Integrated Management Group, based in Virginia Beach, have booked shows and operated venues in the region for years.

General manager Ken MacDonald has assured city officials that this season will be solid. The 12 events already announced will be supplemented with more shows later in the season, he said.

The past few years have been a gradual “building back process,” he said. When his company took over management in 2006, there had been almost no season ticket or box seat sales the previous season because of the ongoing roof and management troubles.

This year, MacDonald said, IMG has also sold nearly half of the 40 VIP box seats to corporations and organizations. There are other positive signs, he said.

Last Saturday’s Picnic at the Pavilion gospel festival was close to a sellout. Bands such as Poison and Crosby, Stills and Nash, which in years past played at the much larger Verizon Wireless Virginia Beach Amphitheater, are scheduled for the nTelos Pavilion this summer.

MacDonald said he expects that downsizing trend to continue, which would bring more big-name acts to Portsmouth’s smaller outdoor venue.

“It takes time to build,” he said. “It’s just a highly competitive market.”

The market is more crowded today than it was when the nTelos Pavilion opened. MacDonald said his amphitheater not only competes with new concert halls in Norfolk, Newport News and Virginia Beach, but other summertime staples such as Norfolk Tides baseball games and the beach.

The region’s other outdoor venue – the Virginia Beach Amphitheater, with a capacity of 20,000 – has 20 shows already lined up .

According to monthly reports submitted to the city by IMG, paid attendance dropped in 2007 to just less than 37,000 from about 40,000 – meaning that each show on average attracted fewer than 1,700 people.

Industry watchers and city officials say they aren’t sure why attendance isn’t better. But some warned that the performance may hurt its ability in the future to attract shows.

“Failure breeds failure, success breeds success,” said Gary Bongiovanni, editor in chief of Pollstar, a company that reports concert schedules and ticket sales. “Nobody has to play Portsmouth. If you’re only going to go out and do 40 or 50 dates in the summer, you’ve got choices.

“And if you’re looking at a track record of unfulfilled demand, it makes you a lot less optimistic.”

Venues such as the Virginia Beach Amphitheater also benefit from being managed by companies such as Live Nation, who book entertainment acts for dozens of venues around the country, industry watchers say.

In post-concert surveys of nTelos patrons, MacDonald said, reviews are positive, with people lauding the waterfront location and convenience of parking. The trick now, he said, is showing off Portsmouth’s entertainment asset to more people.

“It’s not uncommon to hear that it’s their favorite place in Hampton Roads to see a concert,” MacDonald said. “It’s just a matter of getting more and more people to experience nTelos Pavilion.”

Last fall, MacDonald told council members that his company was “operating on getting on a more even keel to our marketplace.”

That, council members say, needs to happen fast. They’ve pushed in the past for more non concert events and for the amphitheater and for its waterfront plaza to be more accessible to the public.

Far from Portsmouth, one city-owned amphitheater is doing just that.

Fraze Pavilion, just outside Dayton, Ohio, sold nearly 72,000 tickets in 2007, nearly twice the number the nTelos Pavilion did. Along with acts similar to those playing this year at nTelos, the Fraze – which with 4,300 seats is smaller than Portsmouth’s amphitheater – has $2 Tuesday night cover band shows and $5 Friday admission and hosts events such as citywide block parties, wine festivals and car shows.

There are six events already planned for the Fraze in May and 16 in June.

Councilman Moody said that, to be successful, nTelos needs to ascribe to that model. Ideally, the amphitheater would be used two or three times a week during the summer, he said. Although Portsmouth’s high school graduations are held there, only a few other nonconcert events are planned for the pavilion at the moment.

From his office overlooking the amphitheater, Mayor Jim Holley said in March that city leaders need to promote the venue more and look for more interesting uses for the public plaza and concert space.

“It has not become the success we envisioned,” Holley said. “Something’s got to take place to get people walking around there.”

Meghan Hoyer, (757) 446-2293, meghan.hoyer@pilotonline.com