Colleen Jennings-Roggensack and Tim Kashani Virtual Interview, | ShowbizU x The Broadway League

I'm Colleen Jennings-Rogensack, Vice President of Cultural Affairs at Arizona State University and Executive Director of ASU Gammage in Tempe, Arizona.

Well, thank you so much, Colleen, for joining us today in this virtual environment that we're in. In fact, let's start with your beautiful background.

Well, what's really great about doing all this Zooming that we're doing is you can be anywhere. And so currently I am standing in front of ASU Gammage, and it is the last building Frank Lloyd Wright, the famed American architect, designed and built under President Gammage at ASU. Frank Lloyd Wright was dear friends with President Gammage, and President Gammage said, a great university deserves a great performing arts center. So Frank Lloyd Wright walked to the campuses and it's a large campus here. He put down his walking stick and he said, "Here, I will build a building with outstretched arms that says welcome to Arizona." What you do there, you are an educational institute, but you also move the art form forward. Absolutely. What's so exciting about being here, I have been of the 54 years of this institution, I have been its executive director for more than half that time, so almost 26 years, 28 years. And so during that point in time, we have done a myriad of things. Most prominently, we have become one of the number one touring houses in the country through Broadway. We had a 3,017-seat house, and we pride ourselves on presenting not only what's great about Broadway and the great Broadway tradition, but we also like to be the risk takers in the Broadway field. So in fact, when Angels in America in 1994 just had finished, it was starting its tour, and the big discussion was Angels would be an East Coast and a West Coast thing. The middle of the country, which we are considered, would not be suitable for that. And we worked, we pushed and pushed and pushed, and so Tempe was the first place outside of New York and LA that Angels in America came. It was marvelous. So we love, we love the classics. So King and I and My Fair Lady, and we are, we are a great, great theater for Disney's Lion King, which will be with us this summer, and we're looking at Frozen. So it's a great place for that, but it's also going to be a great place for Oklahoma!, the new Oklahoma! that Eva Price produced and Daniel Fishburne directed. And our audiences have grown with us. They go, Okay, we're ready, take us on this ride. So that's been exciting. So in addition to a very full, we do, you know, a high of 20 weeks of Broadway, probably average 12 to 16 weeks of Broadway. We have a high of 22,000 subscribers, which everybody had during Hamilton, but we range somewhere around 18,000 to 19,000 subscribers. And it's an interesting thing because, and since this is about careers, you would think, Sell every seat, sell every subscription. Well, Arizona is a state where 2 people move in, 1 person moves out. So we don't actually wanna sell every single subscription. We wanna be able to have space for new people to come in and join us and follow us and love us. And for a lot of businesses across the state, we're great business partners. I belong to the Rotary, I chaired our Convention and Visitors Bureau because we are business partners And a lot of businesses use the work at Gammage as a way to entice new employees. But in addition to Broadway work, we also do what we call Beyond. And those are artists like Bill T. Jones, who also happens to have a Tony, but he's a contemporary dancer. We've worked with Jeff Sobol. We've worked with a number of really amazing artists. Camille Brown, we actually helped to launch her modern dance career. And now here Camille is a sought-after not only Broadway choreographer, but a Broadway director. So we do a wide range of things. Contemporary music, Brandy Eckert. We've done a lot of work with Brandy, who is from California and one of our favorites in terms of vocalists. But so we have the Beyond work, and then we have a whole, whole department called Cultural Participation, because as we think, here we are in the middle of the pandemic, partly what people want to do is not only be a part of what's happening on the stage. They want to be a part of what happens behind the stage and how they can integrate in the work that they do. So our Cultural Participation Program does interviews and talks. We do Talkback Thursday with every company that comes into town, although with the pandemic, some of those things will change. But we're learning now how to do those things video-wise. But we also do master classes. We have, in fact, one of our favorite programs is the ASU Gammage High School Musical Theater Awards Program.

Well, the Jimmy Awards are near and dear to our heart as well. In fact, like you were saying, it used to be the hardest ticket to get on Broadway, and that's why we now livestream it very virtual into what you and I are doing here and embracing new ways of getting theater out there.

We also do a number of other programs, and one of our longtime favorites— and we were the first site out of New York— is Camp Broadway. So we were really thrilled, and so we just celebrated our 20th year of doing the camp, and we have kids who've grown up in the camp who've gone on to careers on the stage but have also gone on to just be wonderful cultural supporters. And my own daughter did 5 years of camp. And really love Camp Broadway. But in addition to our camps, we also do a wide array of things out into the community. And so we work with— in the prisons, we have been in the Australia Correctional Facility for now 25 years, and we work with young, old, and middle-aged women, teaching them to take their mask of victimhood off and become productive members coming out into the community through singing, dancing, painting, writing. And we— our program in this Australia jails has been the one with the lowest recidivism rate. So people go through this arts-based program and say, okay, I am important, I do have a voice, and I have something to contribute. So those kinds of programs are so important to us, and they are great and meaningful.

All right, well, You, you do just an absolute amazing amount of different endeavors. Can you dig into the word that just keeps coming to me that, that you do is community? We talked about it earlier, and a lot of people that watch these are thinking, how do I break into this community? I love it, but isn't it really hard to do?

You know, that is That's such a great question. And often, I was just on the phone, and I think about this, with Katie Andrews, who is the assistant company manager from "Ain't Too Proud." And I was just checking in on her. Katie was 10 years old. I hope I don't cry. She picked up the phone, called my office, asked to speak to me, and said, I want to know what you do and how you do it. I said, well, why don't you come, and we'll have lunch in my office and talk. Her mom drove her to the office, and we sat down and had a conversation about what to do and where you go and what does it mean to be a presenter, and, you know, what are kind of the courses you might take and where you might find your lot in life. Katie went off to American University. She then— we had our very first advocacy meeting with the Broadway League in D.C., and she and 3 of her friends came and were volunteers. All 3 of her friends went to New York. All 3 of them got jobs in the business. Katie went to work at Manhattan Theatre Club. So one of the things I would advise people, and I say this all the time when I'm speaking, find someone who you would consider to be a good mentor and call them up and say, or email them first, and say, I only need 20 minutes of your time. Have your questions written out. What you want to know and the direction that you want to go in and take that 20 minutes. So you can break into this community, and this is an amazingly giving community. It— I don't know. And the other thing is, I tell people, young people, always say to that person, who else could you recommend me to that I speak to for 20 minutes? And they will give you a list. And then you say, would you mind doing the introduction? And 9 times out of 10, they'll say, not at all. I'll be happy to do that. And I tell people to understand this is a large ecosystem. Diane Paulus says we are a village and we all just live in different houses in the village. So I send people in the direction of the LORT theaters, in the direction of community theaters, in looking at civic presenting, college university presenting, and a number of other things. So you can break into this business, kind of, it's that one introduction and we you know, we love the business so much we want to welcome people into it.

I couldn't agree more. And we, we do a lot of mentorship work here in our— in Apples and Oranges Arts. But it's also you— I mean, your heart is like bursting out of your chest. You're just a natural giver. You can't help yourself. And one thing we talk about in our community is, is sometimes people come in and you make that introduction and they, they don't realize how the DNA and the fabric of our industry is to always be giving back. How do you work that into your, into the education that you do?

First of all, our mission is connecting communities. Our mission isn't present the best of Broadway. Our mission isn't, you know, find the most exotic art or the most interesting art or whatever. Our mission is connecting communities. So everything we do, everything my team does is against that mission. If you ask anyone on the staff, they'll say our mission is connecting communities. So am I doing something that's going to connect communities? And so we look at our educational programs as how do we not only connect artists to young people, artists to seniors, artists to an issue that we are facing in the community. For instance, we're working with Aaron Landsman, who's with Elevator Repair Service, and Aaron does a piece called City Hall, and what he does is he comes into the community and he looks at the issues facing us in our community. He talks to people, he puts people together, and then he creates this evening of which our mayor and our city council was a part of it, some of our homeless youth— we have a big homeless population— was a part of it, and addressing those issues on the stage and having people do that. So So what really, at our heart of hearts, we're looking at something that's going to connect communities, that's going to push forward and solve an issue or problem we might have, that also— one of my favorite things I love to say to our, our young people when they are, whether they're in Camp Broadway or school performances for schools, is our wish is that you all go to college. We would love you all to be Sun Devils. But more importantly, we want you to know that learning is a cradle-to-grave proposition. You never stop learning. And I tell them, not only is it important that you see work that's out there, it's important that you read, that you find books and you read newspapers. And even if they're on digitally and you don't get that pulled out paper anymore, read and have an understanding of the world that's going to guide and influence you culturally. And most importantly, everybody has a story to tell and every story is important.

Well, you, you're definitely one of those people that when somebody throws you something, you catch it and you run with it. So we are in an interesting period right now, to say the least. What else are you discovering that you will take with you after this moment in time?

You know, one of the things I'm discovering is this whole Zoom world, which I sort of fought long before the pandemic. It actually is a great way to keep high touch with our folks. So we've been doing some Zooming with our donors. We're doing a cocktail hour where we've sent fruit baskets and treats to our donors, and then we're gonna just sit down and have a little glass of wine. The chair of our national council and there's a co-chair, husband and wife team. He's a doctor and she's an engineer. And last night, we— she and I, the three of us had a, like, a 2-hour conversation about where we are, both medically, engineeringly, and what's going on. So this will remain a part of our lives. So I've learned that lesson, that high touch is important. And I think the other thing is, there are a lot of artists who are such givers, and in The Major University Presenters is an organization that myself, Ken Fisher, and Mike Ross from University of Michigan and the University of Illinois founded together. There's now 20 of us, and we were talking about how do we continue forward with this high touch, but how do we also reward those artists? Because for many, many artists, you know, this spring their contracts were force majeure, they were canceled, or they were postponed. And so they were living without any means at all. And along with the artists, you have the producers, and you have the agents and the managers. So one of the things that we are taking forward and we're doing right now is we're hiring a lot of those artists to do afternoon classes, to do performances of some kind, to do interviews. But we're paying them. We're saying, we know that your life has been interrupted. We have a responsibility to you. So that's one of the things I will take forward. Traditionally, I think our responsibility has been, you're in the theater, we're going to make you feel welcome, we're going to take good care of you. Now I know we have to start that relationship and taking care of you long before you come to the theater and long after you leave the theater. And I think that's one of the most important lessons we will take forward.

And thank you so much for taking the time today.

Thank you.

For all of you, we'll have more interviews coming up here shortly, so have a fantastic rest of your day.

Thank you. Be well.