As Zephyr Theatre rebuilds without its founder, its founder rebuilds without her theater
The dust is finally beginning to settle.
The Zephyr Theatre’s new leaders are moving forward, after fairly public leadership and financial shakeups this fall called the Stillwater nonprofit’s future into question.
Calyssa Hall is moving forward, too, to Marine on St. Croix.
The onetime founder and artistic director of the Zephyr Theatre recently moved up to the small river town and launched Frosted Glass Creative, a community theater company. She’s wasting no time: The Zephyr’s board accepted her resignation on Oct. 7. She registered Frosted Glass with the state on Nov. 1. The company’s first show is this month.
“I think any artist would say, if they’re not doing what they’re meant to be doing, [their] soul just kind of dies,” Hall said.
With Hall at the helm, Frosted Glass Creative’s debut is a one-day-only staging of “A Christmas Carol.” The Charles Dickens classic will be reinterpreted as a live radio play, a form that puts the audience in a re-created recording booth of an old-timey radio drama, with original music and sound effects.
Among the cast and crew are familiar names from Zephyr Theatre bills, including co-director Randal Berger and actors David Andrew Macdonald, Monette Magrath, Patrick O’Brien, Peggy O’Connell and others. The show runs twice on Sunday, Dec. 18 — 4 and 7 p.m. — at Marine Village Hall, with desserts from the local ?nna’s Bistro.
Berger previously served as associate artistic director at the Zephyr under Hall’s leadership. Certainly, he said, he recognizes the missteps that occurred at the Zephyr, but he ultimately believes in Hall’s skill and said he values her tendency to stay optimistic in taking risks.
“That can sometimes not pay off, but she’s done it really well for five years at the theater,” he said. “[Those] five years were — what — just luck? I saw how it succeeded in years before, and I would’ve liked to have people try to find a way through this positively.”
Meanwhile, at the Zephyr Theatre, the season’s headlining productions were scrapped but the December calendar remains vibrant, and the theater’s educational programming in schools has continued uninterrupted.
Nicole Bartelt, who recently became chair of the board of trustees as the theater began rebuilding, has been leading behind-the-scenes work on “those pieces that aren’t very exciting” but are necessary, she said: Shoring up governance structures, completing a full financial assessment, auditing the theater’s legal compliance. The board created an advisory group of accountants and lawyers and nonprofit experts. They held listening sessions with the public and furloughed staff that’ll inform the theater’s next steps. New volunteer sign-ups have swelled, and Bartelt said she’s energized by the community’s support.
“They just keep saying, ‘We need you here. We want you here. We want the theater to succeed,’” Bartelt said. “It took however long — 40 years — to get a theater in Stillwater, and they don’t want to see it go away.”
Examining “the domino effect”
A few months ago, an outside consultant presented a review of the Zephyr Theatre’s finances to its board of trustees; the organization’s near-collapse ensued. What exactly happened, of course, depends on whom you ask.
As Calyssa Hall herself looks back on the disintegration of her tenure leading the Zephyr Theatre, she said she believes what “caused the domino effect” was that, at that moment, the organization was earning less than projected in donations yet still had bills to pay; a cash-flow problem.
The financial scrutiny had simply come at an inopportune time of year, Berger contended. Any theater organization, he said, naturally has lean periods or temporary debts that are subsidized by donations and bursts of income as performances run. Before a theater’s marquee holiday show, he said, “things don’t look as rosy as they do after. And if you halted everything there, it would be much more difficult to get through the season.”
In the way Berger characterized it, the Zephyr board’s decision to pull the plug when they “saw numbers that were scary” was a sort of disruption to the ebb and flow of theatrical budgeting.
But the financial numbers that board members saw were, indeed, startling. As of a board statement in October 2022, unpaid wages owed to staff totaled about $92,000. The outstanding tax bill was roughly $130,000. Credit card debts were in the $50,000 range. In both 2019 and 2020, the theater had ended the fiscal year more than $100,000 in the red, per its annual IRS forms. To fully right the ship, the theater would need to come up with around half a million dollars, Robin Anthony, the executive director of the Greater Stillwater Chamber of Commerce, told the Pioneer Press in November.
Most of the theater’s staff were on furloughed leave. Hall resigned, as did several top board members. The holiday show was scrapped. The massive Ice Palace Maze, which in previous years had sprung up in the theater’s parking lot, announced it would find a new home. On Friday, Oct. 14 — payday — the newly appointed Bartelt was forced to tell already-furloughed staff that checks wouldn’t be arriving that day. The theater couldn’t afford to make payroll. Any uncashed checks dated past August were no longer valid.
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As it would later emerge, the legality of the Zephyr accepting donations was, itself, questionable for a time under Hall’s leadership. According to previous Pioneer Press reporting, the state attorney general’s office withdrew the Zephyr’s nonprofit registration status after the organization failed to file annual reports on time in 2019 and 2020. The theater appeared to continue to fundraise as normal. These reports were evidently not filed until after Hall left in October 2022.
In recent public statements, the Zephyr’s board has stated the organization is currently fully able to accept tax-deductible donations.
Berger said that, at the time much of the fallout was becoming known, he was a furloughed staff member and therefore felt he needed to refrain from responding publicly to perceptions of the theater’s inner workings, to avoid appearing inappropriately or destructively argumentative. In separate conversations, he and Hall each lamented that “the narrative” surrounding the theater’s woes felt predominantly negative.
‘Keep creating art’
In founding Frosted Glass, Hall wants to make it quite clear she does not intend to compete with the Zephyr, nor is she “trying to make a point, or anything like that.” She cited that the Zephyr does still have shows scheduled even as they reorganize, though not original productions.
“So that makes me feel more comfortable,” she said. “That, if they’re not producing something right now in-house, then we’re going to produce something. But I don’t want the general feeling of it to be, ‘Oh, she’s competing with the Zephyr,’ because it’s just not about that at all.”
The Zephyr Theatre’s scheduled winter production, Irving Berlin’s musical “Holiday Inn,” was canceled in early November as the board shored up finances after Hall’s ouster.
Hall and Berger each pushed back against the notion that the Zephyr fallout might have caused former staff or patrons to lose trust in Hall, or that it affected her reputation in the greater Twin Cities theater community. From both their viewpoints, the fact that well-respected Zephyr alums continue to work with Hall at Frosted Glass speaks for itself.
Hall wants to stay positive and joyful, she said. As she reflected, her voice warbled with tears; emotional, like someone trying to rekindle the hazy magic of the early days. To remind themselves it indeed once existed.
“We’re all still here, and we’re all going to still keep creating art,” she said. “I want to make sure that I honor all those people who believed in me and the vision from the start, and gave their time and energy and money. All of that still means something to me, and to us, so we’ve got to keep going for their sake.”
As for the financials, Frosted Glass Creative, unlike the Zephyr Theatre, is not a nonprofit. Hall said she structured her new company as a private for-profit enterprise, in part to avoid what she called the “scarcity mentality” of constantly needing to chase grants and charitable contributions. Leaders of private companies are also, generally speaking, not required to route financial and organizational decisions through a governing board.
Berger said all cast and crew members of “A Christmas Carol” are being paid; Frosted Glass received a startup loan from “someone who knows us and believes in us” that he declined to name.
Someone else in Hall’s position might, after leaving an organization, perhaps choose to let things cool down a bit before launching a new and similar project, 10 miles up the road. Not Hall. Is it tenacity? Brazenness? If you ask Hall herself, it’s resiliency — a sense of artistic duty to herself and those who supported her.
“Throughout history,” she said, “art is going to find a way through adversity, and if its existence is threatened, it’s just going to get stronger. And I know I did everything I possibly, possibly could. I gave the Zephyr everything I had.”
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