Presenter Profile: Rich Harris

Name:   Rich Harris
Position:  Theater Manager, The Rialto Theater, Loveland, CO

Rich Harris has been managing the Rialto Theater just since November 2013, but he’s no newcomer to presenting. Over the past 30 years he’s worked at such venues as Town Hall Arts Center (Littleton), Dairy Center for the Arts (Boulder), Lone Tree Arts Center, and Swallow Hill, including 15 years at Teikyo Loretto Heights University in Denver. He also put in seven years as a booking agent.

What do you do as Theater Manager? I run the facility in all aspects, but with two major areas of focus. The Rialto is a wonderful resource for the community and many community groups come and rent the theatre for their productions. The majority of our business is rentals, but we do produce a fair number of shows ourselves. I’m in charge of selecting and booking those shows.

How many events do you book talent for annually? About 25. It depends on whether I want to do fewer acts with large talent fees or more acts--I will probably lean toward more rather than fewer because there are just so many good things to present. I also book for a summer outdoor series at Loveland’s Foote Lagoon--six concerts that are free to the public. We get an average attendance of 2000 people. Also, we have a small arts and education program that I am excited about developing.

How do you find local talent that fits your organization's needs? For me personally, I like to sit down with the Web. I have a long history booking  the performing arts, and of course there are many artists looking for opportunities to perform; two-thirds of our phone calls are people calling me to offer acts. I’ll also be attending a couple of major booking conferences--APAP Arts Presenters Conference, New York, and the Western Arts Alliance on the West Coast.

I’ll certainly be at the Colorado Performing Arts Jamboree this January, which I’ve attended a half dozen times or more. All those people are potential acts. Many of them have played at the Rialto and almost all of them offer arts and education programming. I try to stop by every booth and see what they have to offer.

What is your greatest challenge as a booker? Finding the right act for the situation and then making a deal that is fair to everybody, that everybody feels good about when it’s over. People have their egos and their livelihood and their artistic lives--you can’t always equate that to dollars. I respect the artist immensely and don’t always have the dollars to make it work financially. It’s one big balancing act. But it’s wonderful experience when you get the right artist in front of the right audience.

What is a local act that you worked with recently that was especially successful, and why was it a success? Hazel Miller. She is just a dream to work with. It is wonderful to present her act and music in the best light in a nice theater with professional production staff. I feel really motivated to get her the biggest audience.

Who Cares About the Arts? Loveland Does.

As we witness arts budgets being ripped to pieces like gift wrapping on Christmas morning--only without any present inside--it’s gratifying to hear about a community that is doing bold and visionary work to support the arts.

Like Loveland’s 2012 creation of the Rialto Theater Center.

Photo: Michelle Standiford

The original Rialto Theater in downtown Loveland opened as a vaudeville house in 1920 and thrived as a movie theater for decades before its eventual decline into a mini shopping mall in the 1970s. In the 1980s the City of Loveland began restoration of the building and secured its designation as a National Historic Place. With the help of major fundraising and volunteer labor, the Rialto opened in 1996 as a 446-seat, Art Deco gem with modern sound and lighting equipment. Since then the Rialto has maintained a busy schedule ranging from local theater groups and choruses to national touring musicians, independent and silent films, meetings, and school functions.

“The theater was wonderful, but it didn’t have support spaces,” says Rich Harris, Rialto Theater Manager, explaining that the dressing room was a cramped space with low headroom under the stage and there was no room for offices or classrooms.

“I’ve worked at the Boulder Theatre and the Fox, and they they all have this same challenge,” Harris says. “It is a great credit to the City of Loveland that they decided to fix that problem. They took the building adjoining the Rialto, demolished it, and built a three-story building designed for beautiful support services for the theater.”

The new building, dubbed the Rialto Theater Center, is a joint venture between the City of Loveland; the Rialto Bridge, LLC; and the Community Foundation of Northern Colorado.

The bottom floor is leased to a restaurant in partnership with the city. “The 1919 building and the 2012 building interconnect,” Harris says. “When we want to serve alcohol, we just open up the window between the two.”

The middle floor contains beautiful, modern dressing rooms; meeting rooms; and workshop rooms for arts and education and children’s programs.  The rooms are equipped with slide-down projection screens and all-new audio systems. The top floor is being leased to a communications company.

“It’s very sophisticated,” Harris says. “The Rialto has gone from being a stand-alone theater to a small arts complex. This whole project was visionary.”