SOUTHWEST PAYS PRICE FOR PERFORMANCE CENTER

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. -- Broadway shows regularly come to Southwest Missouri State University's new performing arts center.

But not without a price.

In February 1992, the school's Board of Regents forced then-president Marshall Gordon to resign because of a $7 million cost overrun in the construction of the performing arts center.

The $17.3 million Juanita K. Hammons Hall for the Performing Arts opened in September 1992.

The building houses a 2,200-seat theater and a music department rehearsal hall. There are no classrooms in the building.

Executive Director Enoch Morris said the project took years of planning, dating back to the early 1980s.

"It was a long time coming," he said.

The state legislature gave the university $5 million for the project in 1985.

The university then spent the next several years raising money. The Hammons family, major donors to the school, gave $2 million. Other private contributions and university money also went into the project.

Morris said the center wouldn't have been built without private funds.

But it couldn't survive without university support.

The university subsidizes the center at a cost of about $900,000 a year.

Half of that cost goes to salaries for the center's staff of 12. Utilities and debt service make up the rest of the cost.

"Unless you have huge endowments, performance centers don't make money," Morris said. "If it wasn't for the university, we would have a shell of a building and nothing going on in it."

But the centers do pay off for the community in terms of tourism, Morris said.

About 250,000 people annually attend performances at the center. They stay at local hotels and eat at local restaurants, pumping money into the Springfield economy, he said.

With a population of 147,000, Springfield is more than three times the size of Cape Girardeau. Some 17,000 students are enrolled at Southwest. Southeast is less than half that size.

Morris said a community needs at least a 2,000-seat theater if it wants to bring in Broadway shows.

Without that many seats, ticket prices would be too high, he said.

Many Broadway shows run for a week at a time. And they aren't cheap.

The center had to pay $300,000 for a one-week run of the musical "Cats" or $37,500 per performance.

Ticket prices ranged from $16 to $35.

The shows regularly sell out, Morris said.

"If you want a real true performing arts center that can make an impact on the community, you need to focus on the number of seats and quality construction for sound," he said.

He said a quality theater will cost $6,000 to $8,000 a seat.

At Southwest, the original plans were to build an all-encompassing arts center.

"They were going to even have rooms for all the community arts organizations," said Morris. "It was going to be something for everybody.

In the end, he said, the university settled for a first-class theater.