1997: Easy Come, Easy Go

Ten years ago, the city was full of optimisma nd prosperity. Does 1997 hold a lesson for the Vancouver of 2007?

By Jim Sutherland

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?

Of course there would be losers! In a way that was the beauty of it. Long left to do its own funky thing on the continent’s edge, Vancouver was enjoying a moment in the sun. And if sunshine wasn’t entirely good for the existing eco-system, so be it. Although the odd big musical may have stiffed—hey, that’s showbiz!—the going was far tougher for old-fashioned arts groups and cultural institutions, for stolid local retailers who suddenly found themselves up against competitors like the Virgin Megastore. Having evolved in a quiet, cloudy place, the locals simply weren’t equipped to chase the elusive new dollars flooding into the city.

And where exactly were these new dollars coming from? Canada was recovering from a nagging recession, after all, and a gathering tech boom was still confined to Silicon Valley. How had Vancouver chugged through the downturn and positioned itself to explode as the national economy finally improved?

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