Inside Vancouver
Easy Come, Easy Go
By Jim Sutherland published Sep 1, 2007
Vancouver doesn't keep a diary, but if it did the entry for December 31, 1997, would have gone like this: "Crazy year! Busy, busy, busy-then not, not, not." Illustrating its command of the lingo beginning to show up on the new-fangled internet, the perplexed city might well have concluded: "WTF?"
WTF indeed. The first signs that 1997 wouldn't unfurl precisely as envisioned were already in evidence one year earlier, on December 31, 1996. That was the evening Vancouver was to have enjoyed its global coming-out party, when opera singers Placido Domingo, José Carreras and Luciano Pavorotti-the Three Tenors!-were to have pulled in some 56,000 people to BC Place at an average price exceeding a hundred dollars each. Alas, even without knowing that the performance would be kitschy and half-hearted, Vancouverites failed to exhibit the appropriate wallet-opening enthusiasm, causing a last-minute ducat dump that particularly irked those who had paid $650 "while the skateboarder in the next seat got two free tickets with his jumbo Slurpee," as Steve Burgess noted in this magazine, which I edited at the time.
Still, the fiasco had all the earmarks of a one-off. Oh sure, the city was proving to be not quite the Broadway Northwest some had foreseen, as another columnist, John Masters, noted in the magazine's December 1996 edition. Show Boat closed a month early, Tommy cut its run from five weeks to 10 days and Man of La Mancha didn't even open-but this was hardly surprising in a city where the dailies regularly featured page after page of advertising for mega-musicals courtesy of super-promoter Garth Drabinsky and press lords David Radler and Conrad Black. Maybe the local market was not quite the 10-million people-arrived at by including residents of Seattle, Calgary and Edmonton, among others-that promoters like Drabinsky and the Tenors' Tina VanderHeyden had identified. Realistically, did anyone not think some venues would suffer when the just-launched NBA Grizzlies were packing sparkling GM Place and the PGA tour had added an annual stop at Arnold Palmer-designed Northview? Would there not be a few losers in a town where a splashy new Planet Hollywood vied with fun-filled upstarts like Lola's and the Century Grill for discretionary, if not always discreet, dollars?
