Gallo Center poised to close books on best season yet

Success breeds success at the Gallo Center for the Arts, which will mark another best-ever season in ticket sales when the 2014-15 books close this summer. It also breeds pressure to keep the momentum going.

“It absolutely puts more pressure on me,” Gallo Center Chief Executive Officer Lynn Dickerson said of trying to top each newly successful season.

As of Thursday evening, the Gallo Center had sold nearly $5 million in tickets, with several shows remaining in the current season, which ends in June. Tickets sales for the previous season, 2013-14, closed at $4.5 million, according to Doug Hosner, director of marketing and public relations.

“It was our best season ever,” Dickerson said of 2014-15. “And, you know, the year before that was our best season ever, so we were going up against our all-time best.”

The center found its comfort zone early, surpassing the $4 million mark in ticket sales in January.

So far this season, the Gallo Center has notched 50 shows at capacity – those either completely sold out or with only scattered single seats left empty, Hosner said, including some that haven’t even happened yet – a Bonnie Raitt performance on May 20 and one by Peter Frampton on June 3.

Last year, the center sold 45 at-capacity shows for the 1,250-seat Mary Stuart Rogers Theater and the 444-seat Foster Family Theater.

This season, tickets were sold for 119 acts, with 137 performances on the downtown Modesto venue’s two stages, not including community outreach arts education performances, Hosner said.

Among the most popular attractions were two Broadway offerings, “Mamma Mia” and “Sister Act,” along with a variety of performers including culinary guru Alton Brown; YouTube sensations Lindsay Stirling and 2 Cellos; Christian artist Michael W. Smith; Irish singing group Celtic Thunder; comedian Wanda Sykes; Beatles tribute act Rain; and Latino stars Pepe Aguilar, Joan Sebastian and Ramon Ayala.

Those last three artists represent a victory in reaching a demographic that previously had eluded the Gallo Center.

“I would say the takeaway from this year is we made a great breakthrough in Latino programming,” Dickerson said. “Up until this season, most everything we had had was still along the lines of ballet folklórico, mariachi groups, that kind of thing, and this year we were able to get three really big-name, popular acts, and all of a sudden it was like, wow, we got on the map with that population, which has been great.”

Adding to its successes, tickets are selling faster earlier for the center, which makes it something of an anomaly among performing arts venues.

Most arts centers are “last-minute markets,” Hosner said, where the majority of tickets sell close to the performance date. A marketing research consultant who works with the Gallo Center told it that the downtown Modesto venue has become “the envy of performing arts centers in the United States because of this kind of success, because of the advance purchasing and the number of sellouts,” Hosner said.

“In our early years, people were waiting until within 30 days to buy tickets almost exclusively. Now, we have so many shows that are selling out way in advance that it’s shifted that whole buy pattern,” Dickerson said.

She said that shift likely stems from procrastination during the center’s early years, when patrons found waiting shut them out of seeing artists. People no longer risk that wait.

“Nothing like scarcity to make demand go up,” Dickerson said.

All this success has raised the center’s profile, with agents relating that the Gallo Center has earned “a reputation as the premier performing arts venue in Central California,” Hosner said.

Dickerson spoke of a failed negotiation for an artist she really wanted to book. While she was frustrated, the artist’s agent told her to calm down, saying “What you don’t realize is I’m getting calls now from other venues, other agents, even the artists, saying who the hell is the Gallo Center and where the hell is Modesto, California?” she said. “He said, ‘You guys are really on the map now,’ so that’s been sort of exciting.”

Illustrating that is an upcoming return appearance by pop/rock artist Rob Thomas on July 3. Booking Thomas for his April 2014 show was no easy negotiation, Dickerson said, which can be typical of bigger-name artists not familiar with the Modesto venue.

“Then they get here and they see that we have this world-class facility and they see our staff is excellent, they play to a sold-out show, people in town treat them wonderfully and they just have a really great experience,” she said.

So while she struggled with Thomas’ representatives to book his 2014 show, this year they called her.

“(They call) us the second time and say, ‘Hey, we’re doing another run through California, what would you think of having us back?’” Dickerson said.

All the success has led to the Gallo Center being in the black financially since its 2009-10 season, with the 2015-16 shows about to be announced in mid-May – and, with that, another year of pressure to yet again top ticket sale numbers.

“Sure,” Hosner said, acknowledging that annual challenge, “and we love it.”

This story was originally published April 26, 2015 at 8:02 PM with the headline "Gallo Center poised to close books on best season yet."