The Fox Theatre is one of the nation’s busiest entertainment venues, hosting 250 performances and attracting more than 750,000 guests annually. It has 134,000 Facebook followers, and has finished every year in the black since being saved from the wrecking ball 40 years ago.
The ornate theater is a memory-making place that Atlantans hold dear, like few other buildings in the ever-changing urban landscape, and Fox management wants to make sure it stays that way.
So they're staging a free Fox Rock the Block Party on Sunday that will close down parts of Peachtree Street and Ponce de Leon Avenue for concert stages. It's the biggest wingding in a yearlong "The Legend Lives On" celebration of the 85-year-old showplace's salvation, and more than 12,000 people already have RSVP-ed.
Fox management said it orchestrated the extended series of events to make sure the Moorish-styled theater’s topsy-turvy history is better appreciated in a transient metro area where there is more competition than ever for entertainment dollars.
“We believe that the more Atlantans know our story the more likely they’ll be here to protect us if we’re ever threatened in the future,” Fox President and CEO Allan Vella said.
The theater’s promotional efforts even extend to the touring performers occupying its dressing room tower from a day to a few weeks. So that they too will appreciate the Fox like a longtime Atlantan, a timeline of its history now climbs several stories of its staircase. And the recently redone star dressing rooms have been wallpapered with vintage Fox tickets and posters.
All of this can be viewed by the public in a just-announced series of Behind the Scenes Tours to be offered June 9-20. Fox tours are becoming a cottage industry unto themselves: There's also a history tour, a movie-themed tour and, around Halloween each year, a ghost tour.
The Fox has invested more than $250,000 in “The Legend Lives On” campaign, money that Vella believes is well-spent based on mounting media coverage alone.
The campaign included a March gala honoring original board members of Atlanta Landmarks Inc., the nonprofit formed after the atmospheric movie palace closed, taking over daily operations in 1975. That year, the citizens group rerouted the bulldozers of progress, negotiating a land swap that led Southern Bell (later AT&T) to abandon its development plans for the theater site and build its headquarters behind the Fox instead.
Atlanta Landmarks also mobilized a “Save the Fox” drive that raised $3 million, paying off the mortgage in 1978, six months ahead of schedule.
"I try not to do too many shows there because it's so special to me," comedian Jeff Foxworthy, who was a teenager at the time of the Save the Fox campaign, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution before a "Legend Lives On" gig in April.
“Every time I’m there, I get excited. It’s like my Fenway Park, a sacred place,” continued Foxworthy, who has headlined the Fox more than 10 times. “It’s my favorite theater.”
"The Legend Lives On" hasn't just focused on white-haired veterans of what many consider to be the first major preservation victory in Atlanta, a city where, before the Fox was saved, the wrecking ball came first and the questions later. In collaboration with SCAD students, it also created "Fox in a Box," a free, interactive, touring exhibit that introduces elementary school children to Fox history and emphasizes its intersection with American history, community themes and economics.
Cultivating audiences and anticipating the future are important, Vella said.
“We look at a building like the Georgia Dome, which is only 23 years old and will now be razed to make room for a new stadium because the team and the fans require new features,” he said. “We consider ourselves fortunate, we’ve been able to adapt. The concern is, can we continue to adapt to Atlanta’s needs and stay competitive?”
At the moment, the gilded palace’s position looks, well, golden.
Billboard magazine ranked the 4,665-seat theater No. 2 in its 2014 Boxscore, a tally of event grosses, for venues with fewer than 5,000 seats. This year, "Wicked's" run at the Fox broke two all-time North American touring box-office records by grossing $2.86 million for an eight-performance week, and $3.26 million for a nine-performance week.
The Fox recently inked a deal with “Wicked” presenter Broadway in Atlanta to continue bringing nationally touring shows to the Peachtree Street edifice for an undisclosed period believed to be at least a decade.
Broadway in Atlanta Vice President Russ Belin called the Fox “truly one of the premier Broadway houses in the country” and “one of the most important cultural landmarks in the city.”
The theater has delved deeply into such partnerships since Vella’s arrival in 2006 from SMG, an international facility management company. Now 90 percent of its bookings are either Fox productions or co-productions, and the theater also pursues limited presenting at venues such as Symphony Hall and the Buckhead Theatre.
It’s another way in which the Fox has positioned itself for the future.
“We took a much more aggressive approach in terms of securing entertainment for the facility,” Vella said. “We previously were a rental facility that was very risk averse. Over the nine years, we’ve become very aggressive.”
The aggressive approach has an additional benefit. A $3 surcharge on each ticket goes toward the $1 million plowed into the theater annually for upkeep. The fee dates to 1975, when a 25-cent surcharge was placed on all tickets as part of the “Save the Fox” campaign, and has accounted for more than $30 million over the four decades invested in returning the theater to its appearance of opening day, Christmas Day 1929.
The theater also pays it forward through its Fox Theatre Institute, launched in 2008 to share restoration expertise and project grants with historic theaters across Georgia, including this year's beneficiary, Dahlonega's Holly Theatre. The program constitutes a $1 million-plus commitment.
Vice president and general manager Adina Erwin says the Fox itself has been restored from a big project perspective and that it’s now in a nonetheless demanding “preservation cycle.”
The TLC applied by the two-person restoration department continues daily. The Behind the Scenes Tours, in fact, make it a point to stop in the Paint Shop on the opposite side of the stage from the dressing rooms. During a recent tour preview, the fumes were pungent from projects including a small onion dome-shaped architectural accent that had fallen off the Peachtree marquee.
“It’s never finished,” Erwin said of keeping the architectural gem glistening like it’s 1929.
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