When Stage to Screen Catered Cabaret opened its glittery new dinner theater in Greenwood, supporters had dreams of rollicking live performances, show-stopping musical numbers and an arts experience unlike any other on the southside.
But the ongoing weight of the COVID-19 pandemic has ended those plans abruptly.
"We created this very large extended family. They cared, and we cared," said Chris Tompkins, executive director of Stage to Screen Catered Cabaret. "It was a very magical, but unfortunately extremely short-lived, experience."
Stage to Screen Catered Cabaret will permanently close its doors, Tompkins announced on July 31. Loss of revenue from having been closed since March 14 due to the pandemic left leadership with no other choice.
Though all of those involved tried to find a way to continue on, they were left without another course of action, Tompkins said.
"The unfortunate reality is many businesses are faced with one of the most uncertain futures I believe most of us have experienced in our lifetimes," he wrote in a statement. "There is no way to survive with minimal to no cash flow to just hold on. Simply existing takes money."
When Stage to Screen opened in a storefront space in Old Town Greenwood in 2018, the idea was to provide a professional theater experience for audiences on the southside — something that didn’t exist at the time.
Shortly after it opened, the company added its dinner theater experience, providing themed shows paired with a dinner buffet. Stage to Screen grew in popularity quickly, to the point where Tompkins started exploring moving into a larger space.
Through the support of investors Dorothy and Bob Rynard Sr., that new theater opened on East Main Street in Greenwood in late 2019. The first shows included tributes to Motown and the best of Broadway, Big Band shows and solo cabaret nights.
Not even four months after opening, the pandemic forced the new theater to close down.
"We got closed on March 14, and we were prepared for our next show. We had sold a significant number of tickets to that, we already had all the costumes and went through rehearsal. But we figured we’d shut down for a few weeks and come back," Tompkins said. "Then this whole thing escalated."
Tompkins, who was involved in weekly online meetings from the Indiana Arts Council and is a member of the Arts & Culture COVID-19 Recovery Task Force organized by the state, gathered his creative team and tried to find ways to work through the pandemic. They developed a plan for socially distant shows with scaled-down casts, arranged the theater to keep people safe, and put together an entirely new slate of performances stretching through the rest of the year.
Of the 60 performances they had put together, the theater only sold 24. Patrons who had already bought tickets to shows that had to be cancelled by the pandemic overwhelmingly opted to redeem those tickets in spring 2021.
"At some point, the conversation becomes: When do you stop throwing good money after bad?" he said. "If maybe we could have opened by Christmastime, we could have figured it out. But realistically, we’re probably talking next summer before people come back."
The renovated theater is being taken over by a new business enterprise that will use the space for private events, Tompkins said. The possibility remains to host live performances and shows in the future, when more people are open to gathering in large groups.
But for the time being, there’s nothing else Stage to Screen can do to survive, Tompkins said.
"Every theater is dealing with, every entertainment venue, every attraction — it’s like, how do we do this?" he said.
