After 45 concert seasons, the Warwick Musical Theater is folding its tent. Well sort of. Larry Bonoff, whose father, Buster, was a renaissance man of sorts when he opened a musical theater, literally a tent, in a cow pasture along a rural Route 2 in Warwick, is abandoning that site, leaving it to Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse.
Instead, Bonoff is headed to the renaissance city, Providence, teaming up with the likes of Lynn Singleton, the entrepreneurial president of Providence Performing Arts Center, where the Warwick Musical Theater will live again. Well sort of.
Rhode Island's Market Has Changed. Developers, Builders, Investors and Sellers Must Change With It.
By Emilio DiSpirito IV License Partner | Engel & Völkers Oceanside Leader | The DiSpirito…
Learn More
In a partnership that both Bonoff and Singleton indicate still needs some fine tuning, and is months away from its first show, Bonoff will take the Warwick Musical Theater fare and bring it to PPAC for a series of one-night performances under the umbrella of the Bonoff Celebrity Series, and presented year-round.
“You just haven’t experienced the glory and the beauty we will bring,” Bonoff said, seated in his small office at the Musical Theater, surrounded by T-shirts and other memorabilia. “Just as Buddy (Mayor Vincent Cianci) had his visions of the city. He said you don’t know how beautiful Waterplace Park is going to be it turned out to be beautiful. You don’t know how beautiful this marriage is going to be. We just know it.”
What Bonoff and Singleton envision are up to 40 major concerts a year – if sold out 120,000 seats, at ticket prices likely a bit higher than at the Warwick Musical Theater, pouring millions of dollars in revenue through the PPAC box office, at restaurants, parking lots and other businesses. At an average ticket price of $45, and 100,000 patrons, ticket sales alone would bring $4,500,000. By most measures a community benefits by two to two and half times ticket sales, meaning a possible infusion of another $10 million into the city.
Bonoff said the first year he expects to do 20 shows to see what works, before stepping up the number of concerts.
Ticket prices, he said, will likely fall between those at the Warwick Musical Theater ($30 to $45) and those at PPAC ($40 to $65).
But before anything happens at PPAC, Bonoff said he needs to finish his work at the Musical Theater. That includes Vince Gill’s closing concert on Sept. 4, and the last World Wrestling Federation program on Sept. 5, closing night. After that it will be sales of chairs, pieces of the stage and closing out the corporation.
Will World Wrestling Federation finds it way to the PPAC stage? Not likely. Bonoff will continue to present the WWF at the Providence Civic Center, where nightly revenues can reach $250,000, he said.
And it is likely you’ll see Bonoff the entrepreneur surface elsewhere.
“I’m still an independent man, but I really, how do you say it, I don’t date around,” Bonoff said. “I’m going to sleep with PPAC. It’s my home, just as Warwick Musical was my home. I’m not going to change what I am.”
But Bonoff will continue with WWF at the Civic Center, and help at those non-profits he’s helped before, and possibly put on a show here or there, or a children’s series somewhere.
And as for PPAC, you can expect Johnny Mathis, Alabama, Vince Gill, Carot Top, George Carlin, Englebert and the crowd that has come to Warwick Musical Theater through the years.
NEW PARTNERS in entertainment, Larry Bonoff of Warwick Musical Theater and Lynn Singleton of PPAC in front of Warwick box office.
It is somewhat ironic that the Bonoff’s series will move downtown to a theater that has established its niche in presenting Broadway musical productions. For years, that was the fare at the Warwick Musical Theater, a summer musical comedy series that eventually expanded to include concerts, and then become a concert series.
For PPAC the addition of concerts not only adds revenues, but “rounds out our portfolio,” adding to its highly successful Broadway season, Singleton said.
But this will not be a marriage without its troubles. Some of the same competition that forced the closure of the Warwick Music Theater persists.
That competition is Foxwoods and the Mohegan Sun Casinos, that are vying for the same entertainment. While some of the issues disappear by the move to Providence, Bonoff said he will still have to contend with Foxwoods’ disposition to sign acts to long-term contracts – three to five years – doing one or two shows a year, and “implying that it wasn’t best for their career to play here (the Warwick Musical Theater).”
“Again, this is a battle we’ll fight downtown,” Bonoff said.
But what he doesn’t expect to battle is Foxwoods drain on his audience. Being even 20 minutes further north, he believes he attracts a different audience.
“Big difference,” he said. “By putting me 20 minutes away, I’m now 55 minutes away. By doing that, they feel I’ll be advertising more in the Providence market than their market. You draw a 50 mile circle between Foxwoods and me, the circles overlap a lot more than by being in Providence.
“I can also deal for a different type of crowd at a different time of year,” he said. “By my being so powerful in the summer, they felt I hurt their business at Foxwoods.”
Bonoff said that when Foxwoods opened he began to see a deterioration in his audience, 10 percent a year.
Bonoff expects that drain to stop with a new audience, a new location that he expects to make him “bigger and stronger than I ever was.”
“This exposes the same acts that have been playing for years to a uniquely different audience,” Bonoff said. “Northern and Southern Rhode Island are as different as the Mason Dixon line.”
And opening night at PPAC in the renaissance city should be a lot different than opening night along a rural Route 2 in a tent on a former cow pasture, with trees for neighbors and a small diner across the way. At PPAC, the few trees around will likely be aglitter with lights, the mayor might even arrive, and policemen on horseback will be near the PPAC entrance.
And maybe, Vince Gill, Alabama or some other country group will sing some tune that might seem right for a building constructed as a movie place, but bring back memories of a 30-year-old Buster Bonoff and his dream, a cow pasture in Warwick, and 45 seasons in the suburbs and the opening night production on June 24, 1955 of “Annie Get Your Gun” at ticket prices ranging from $1.20 to $3.60.
