I've seldom met a theater producer with as much energy and sheer willpower as Mike Mathews.
I wanted to talk with the 29-year-old Mathews because I was so impressed with his Salerno Theatre Company's The Music Man, reviewed last week. Though the show had its weaknesses, it also had sequences of wonderful artistry performed by actors of real talent. Watching Music Man, it occurred to me that I'd better start taking Salerno seriously — and that it would help if I had a better sense of its artistic director. So we spent an hour at the Barnes and Noble café in Tampa's Carrollwood, where I discovered Mathews to be dynamic, aggressive and irrepressibly enterprising.
He looks like an athlete (he's a former college baseball player with a black belt in three styles of martial arts), talks like a salesman (his day job is running both a video production and marketing company) and happens also to be a star-struck performer (he's acted and sung lead roles in four Salerno productions). His ambitions are far-reaching: He'd like to turn what is now a semi-professional theater with a single home in Gulfport into an Equity company with privately owned venues all over the Southeast.
Mathews doesn't expect it to happen overnight, and he's prepared to invest his own money and time. And he has reason to be optimistic — after all, his last few musicals have turned a profit, and he's had several sold-out houses at the 176-seat Catherine Hickman Theatre. What's remarkable about this is that Salerno has only existed for two-and-a-half years; some much more venerable Bay area companies have trouble mustering an audience of 50 on a Saturday night. Clearly, Mathews is doing something — or more likely, many things — right.
So how has he managed to attract audiences to a theater that still employs only a skeletal orchestra and many amateur performers? Of course, he believes that the quality of his shows is paramount. But he also offers two further reasons, one of which is, simply enough, location. "We're just really very fortunate to be in Gulfport," he says. "The area is very artistic, very supportive."
He estimates that 60 to 65 percent of his audience lives in the town to which Salerno moved — after an earlier stint in Tampa — in January of this year. "I didn't want to leave Tampa," he says, "because personally I feel like Tampa needs more quality theater."
But while wanting to play a part in his home city's efflorescence, he couldn't afford the rentals demanded of him there. "It's the theater business," he emphasizes. "Business is paramount with me. If I can't keep the lights on, it doesn't matter how good the show is." The underused Hickman Theatre offered him an attractive deal, as well as a local audience — many of them seniors — who weren't previously being served by a musical theater company. And now Salerno is booked at the Hickman years in advance: "We don't have to worry about where our next show is going to be," Mathews says. "We have three seasons already planned out with precise dates. We're selling season tickets; we have the support that we need; and we're doing the shows people want to see."
Mathews feels that's the other reason for Salerno's success: The company schedules classics — The Music Man, Fiddler on the Roof, Damn Yankees — whose reputations have been long established. "I'm all about doing the artistic shows," says Mathews, "but if I can't keep the bills paid …" His voice trails off. The logic is inescapable. So he mostly plays it safe with audience favorites, rendered as artfully as possible. Then, after satisfying spectators with surefire hits, he wagers that ticket-buyers will be willing to try an unknown quantity like the coming Don't Hug Me — a new musical still on its way to Off-Broadway.
"And they're going to come back and take the chance," he says. "And then we back it up with several other shows such as The Scarlet Pimpernel, such as Annie Get Your Gun, you know, the shows that are near and dear to people's hearts."
Call it caution — or good business. Still, one senses that if the lesser-known musicals don't sell tickets, Mathews will happily drop them from the mix altogether.
Moving on, I ask Mathews to speak not as producer but as artistic director, particularly about how he finds talented performers to work — most of them, anyway — for free. For instance, of the 28 actors appearing in The Music Man, "only four or five" were paid — along with the director, choreographer and technicians.
Mathews insists that finding willing performers isn't a problem, and that he makes a point of giving Salerno's actor/singers such a good experience that they want to come back "even though they're not getting rich." (My own experience of Music Man and a couple of earlier shows tells me that talent levels at the Salerno are still erratic.)
Mathews says that occasionally he adds some funds to the theater's budget so that Equity actors, like Michael O. Smith in The Music Man, can contribute their experience to the mix. Part of his reasoning: Top performers have a good effect on everyone in the cast. "It was amazing to see all the actors' games come up when Michael came in," he says. He adds that while all Equity actors aren't better than non-union ones, he'd love to employ more of them as he can afford to.
And on the subject of his wish list, he wants to add "straight" plays to his coming seasons, and expand the orchestra for his musicals. Looking even further into the future, he'd like eventually to own his own theater building, "ideally" in Tampa, but more "realistically" in Pinellas, "because they're much more supportive of the arts over there."
In time, he aspires for Salerno to become a union theater, and he especially looks forward to rewarding the people who are donating time and talent now. "The goal is to be successful and take my friends and business associates with me," he says. "It's not about Mike Mathews, it's about Salerno. We're not interested in 'me' people, we're interested in 'we' people." He says that he's grateful to a lot of talented helpers: "The basic business skill is surround yourself with people who are better in a particular area than you are."
Mathews is dedicated and tenacious and his theater company — for which he occasionally acts and sings — is already selling out houses and making a profit. Not bad for someone under 30 in this notoriously difficult arts community.
Can he achieve his wildest dreams while other theater people are barely hanging on?
That's the most interesting — and as yet unanswerable — question about the surprising Mike Mathews.
This article appears in Jul 5-11, 2006.