The show opens with the sound of a ticking clock. Jon is panicky because he is about to turn 30 and has yet to write a truly successful musical. “Turn 30 … Boom! You’re passé,” he sings in tick, tick… BOOM!
New York City actor Coleman Cummings played the role in Vermont Stage’s 2024 production. Jonathan Larson’s autobiographical musical follows a New York City musical theater composer as he wrestles with a wrenching choice: continue pursuing his dream or throw in the towel.
Vermont Stage turned 30 the year it produced the show, the final full play of its 2023-24 season. Unbeknownst to Cummings, his two fellow actors, the musicians and crew, the company stood at a similar crossroads. An executive director hired to manage the business had left after 17 months. Ticket sales and donations had failed to meet projections, and Vermont Stage was on track to end the year more than $175,000 in the red, an operating loss more than five times larger than any in the previous 20 years.
Board members and producing artistic director Cristina Alicea, who also directed tick, tick… BOOM!, had decided to let the company’s future ride on the show’s success. None of them wanted to close Vermont Stage, Alicea said, but some, herself included, asked themselves if it was time. That season — the company’s third post-pandemic — subscriber numbers remained low, and ticket sales were wildly unpredictable.
Board meetings that spring became “heartfelt discussions,” Alicea said. Maybe people didn’t want live theater anymore. “I think COVID, in a lot of ways, broke people’s ability to gather in public,” board member Maria McGrath said.
Alicea and the board could raise the money to erase the deficit and mount a subsequent season, she recalled them discussing, but should they? “The main question that the board posed that year … was: Do we have the audience anymore?”
Tick, tick… BOOM! opened its four-week run with sparse attendance, and Alicea feared she had the answer. A musical with a compelling story and beautiful soundtrack “is a Vermont Stage show through and through,” she said, and it wasn’t selling.
“But then,” she said, “by the middle of the second week, it started creeping up. And then we were basically sold out by the third week and the fourth week.” They added the optional matinee at the end of the run.
“We put that question out into the universe … Is there a desire for Vermont Stage to still exist?” Alicea said. “And those folks showed up and answered that question as a yes.”
In two weeks, Vermont Stage will open its 31st season with The Garbologists, a comedy about a white, male veteran trash collector paired with a Black, female, Ivy League-educated newbie on a New York City garbage truck. The Lindsay Joelle play epitomizes the company’s offerings: contemporary works with socially relevant themes that spark discussion.
Keeping the curtain rising at northern Vermont’s only professional theater company is a theatrical tale in its own right. The Vermont Stage story brims with bold artistic choices; nail-biting cliff-hangers (plural) when the company nearly folds; and a cast of artists, administrators and theater lovers whose grit, generosity and commitment keep it all running. And it’s all enlivened by the exuberance of generations of Vermont kids seeing the plays they wrote performed by professionals through the company’s Vermont Young Playwrights program.
Though not a union house, Vermont Stage pays all of its actors, directors and creative staff. It’s not a living wage, Alicea said: “We pay as well as we can, given our size.”
Even in the best of times, the cost to produce a show is typically double the show’s ticket revenue. Educational programs don’t cover their own costs, either.
“We lose money on everything,” said Alicea, 46, who has led the company since 2011. The situation is not unique to Vermont Stage, she added. “There isn’t any money in nonprofit theater.” Donors, corporate sponsors and grants make up for the operating losses. Vermont Stage carries no other debt.
The company was in solid financial shape, set to raise the most revenue in Alicea’s tenure, when the COVID-19 pandemic shut it down in 2020. Five years later, it continues to recover, along with performing arts organizations nationwide, all of which are navigating a continually shifting economic and political landscape.
Ticket buyers’ habits have changed. Vermont Stage subscribers numbered 395 last season, roughly two-thirds of their pre-pandemic number. President Donald Trump’s attempts to eliminate arts and humanities agencies cast future funding in doubt. Public broadcasting’s loss of federal funding threatens to divert donor dollars away from other nonprofits. Even fluctuating lumber prices and tariffs on Canadian imports affect theaters by increasing their set-building budgets.
“Theatre Facts 2023,” a study released in March by Theatre Communications Group in partnership with SMU DataArts, shows that ticket income in U.S. professional nonprofit theaters increased 31 percent between 2022 and 2023, but it remained 29 percent lower than in 2019, when adjusted for inflation. Contributed income — money from donors, governments, grants and foundations — dropped 15 percent from 2022 to 2023 and 11 percent from 2019, when adjusted for inflation.
Even before the pandemic, the great plot twist no one saw coming, Vermont Stage’s drama was playing out offstage as well as on. Mark Nash summed it up effectively 16 years ago, when he was producing artistic director.
Vermont Stage’s history, he told Seven Days for a story on the company’s 15th anniversary, “makes for a pretty neat narrative arc: A company starts out all plucky. Then it almost crashes and burns, and then it pulls itself back up by its bootstraps.”
Blake Robison started the company in 1994. After acting in New York City, he had returned to Vermont to find lots of summer theater but a dearth the rest of the year. For its inaugural season, Vermont Stage produced The Glass Menagerie at Champlain College in Burlington.
Under Robison, now producing artistic director at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, the itinerant company presented primarily reimagined classics. It also debuted work by Vermont playwright Dana Yeaton, who in 1995 helped start Vermont Young Playwrights, a program that has taught playwriting to nearly 14,000 middle and high school students and is still running. Yeaton’s Mad River Rising premiered in 1998 and went on a statewide “barnstorming tour” — performed in actual barns — the following season.
Nash, who had been a Vermont Stage actor, began his 11-year run as producing artistic director in 2000, the year the company found a home stage at Flynn Space. Its first production there was Yeaton’s stage adaptation of Chris Bohjalian’s novel Midwives.
With its low ceilings and posts, the space proved artistically limiting but cozy and easy to reconfigure. “Professional theater in an intimate setting” became the company’s tagline during its 18 years at Flynn Space. Having a home stage offered stability and the opportunity to sell seasonal subscription packages, which are valuable to theaters as a source of the up-front cash needed to launch a season.
Nash gravitated toward plays with small casts, and the company often staged them arena-style, putting the actors and audience “within touching distance,” he said. “I liked to find whatever sense of warmth and connection and love that was the underlying current of any production that I was creating.”
A good example is the 2002 Vermont Stage production of Waiting for Godot, which Nash directed. The Samuel Beckett play, in which two men wait for a third who never arrives, “is usually thought of as kind of a nihilistic play full of despair … and it is supposed to underline the absurdity of life,” Nash said. Under his direction, “I made it into these two guys, no matter how hopeless life was, they still supported each other.”
In that vein, life has imitated art at Vermont Stage. When the company hit rough patches, donors repeatedly stepped up to support it, as when it nearly folded in the 2004-05 season. Vermont Stage had grown from offering one or two shows a year to four-show subscription seasons, Nash said, but was struggling to gain name recognition. Some patrons thought it was part of the Flynn.
“We just hadn’t quite figured out how to balance income and expenses, and we were on this steep learning curve that led to a point where we weren’t sure we could mount our [next] season,” Nash said. He “put out an emergency call” for support.
Contributions flowed in, followed by “a fairly substantial anonymous donation,” Nash said. “A few years later, somebody showed up out of the blue and wiped out our last bit of debt.”
Now a Charlotte psychotherapist, Nash returned to Vermont Stage last year to perform in the 20th rendition of the anthology “Winter Tales,” a tradition he started in 2005.
In 2011, he passed the producing artistic director baton to Alicea, previously the assistant to the managing director of Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, D.C. She set out to focus on cutting-edge contemporary plays. Among them were the first Vermont production of Fun Home, the Tony Award-winning musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir of the same name; The Mountaintop, Katori Hall’s reimagining of the night before Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination; Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike; and David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People, presented by Vermont Stage just two years after it opened on Broadway.
By 2020, the company was financially stable and on track to bring in $538,000 in revenue, nearly double what it had during Alicea’s first year.
“We had real momentum going,” she said.
The company had just moved its productions to Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center and was set to launch Vermont Stage Youth Company when COVID-19 arrived. Marie and Rosetta, a musical selling well, closed mid-run, and Vermont Stage announced it would shutter for a year. Everyone, including Alicea and general manager Jamien Forrest, was laid off.
“We live in wildly uncertain times right now, and so we’re going to keep making theater in response to that.”
Maria McGrath
The two administrators, hired the same year, believed the company would reopen but questioned whether they could return. The pandemic had slashed the budget in half, essentially wiping out the gains they had made. Alicea asked herself, “Do I want to push this boulder back up this hill?” Both she and Forrest decided to try.
A virtual “Winter Tales” in 2020 and two outdoor “picnic plays” in 2021 provided a gradual reopening as Vermont Stage strove to adapt. The company adopted a new ticketing model that lets buyers pick their price. It’s built on goodwill, and it’s working, Alicea said. “It’s like giving the community of people here the opportunity to do good, and they’re choosing to do it.”
Donors, too, continue to step up. One gave $100,000 over the course of two post-pandemic seasons to help cover lost ticket sales. Last season, an anonymous $50,000 gift arrived “out of nowhere” just as donations were falling behind, Alicea said. “Donors are called angels for a reason!”
To rein in expenses last summer, Alicea furloughed five administrators, herself included. This July, she cut her hours and those of Forrest, the only other full-time staffer.
“I can’t say strongly enough the level of love and commitment that the people working for this company have,” board member McGrath said.
The tick, tick… BOOM! audience gave Vermont Stage its mandate: Keep making shows. “We just continue looking forward,” McGrath said. Last year, the company launched a program that brings discussion-provoking social justice plays to Vermont schools.
The 2024 numbers were scarier than usual, McGrath acknowledged, but small nonprofits always walk a tightrope. After ending 2024 with a $177,500 deficit, Vermont Stage bounced back to finish its 2025 fiscal year, on June 30, about $10,000 in the black.
The future of Vermont Stage “feels as solid as anything else in the United States right now,” McGrath said. “We’re going to keep going. But we live in wildly uncertain times right now, and so we’re going to keep making theater in response to that.”
Alicea did not tell anyone in the tick, tick… BOOM! cast and crew how badly the company needed the show to do well. “It’s not their burden,” she said.
Cummings and his fellow actors, Kianna Bromley of Montpelier and Connor Kendall of South Burlington, performed their preshow routines and then gathered in a tight huddle backstage just before each show began.
They could hear the audience buzzing as they held hands, took deep breaths and reminded themselves why the show was important. Then they made eye contact: three “partners in crime,” as Bromley called them, who had developed deep trust and had each other’s backs lest anything go wrong.
This Season at Vermont Stage
- The Garbologists: A veteran New York City trash collector is paired with an Ivy League-educated newbie in Lindsay Joelle’s odd-couple comedy. Thursdays through Sundays, September 25 to October 12.
- “Winter Tales”: Hot cider and cookies pair with moving stories and music in this beloved Vermont Stage tradition. Wednesday, December 10, to Sunday, December 14.
- Murder on the Orient Express: Famed detective Hercule Poirot is on the case in Ken Ludwig’s adaptation of the Agatha Christie thriller. Thursdays through Sundays, January 29 to February 22.
- The Half-Life of Marie Curie: Lauren Gunderson’s historical drama is based on the true story of the Nobel Prize winner who was chastised over an alleged affair. Thursdays through Sundays, March 19 to April 5.
- Rhinoceros: A small town’s residents turn into rhinos in Eugène Ionesco’s cutting social satire. Thursdays through Sundays, April 30 to May 17.
- The Bake Off: Three playwrights each whip up a brand-new short play inspired by a classic, staged by three separate casts and directors. Wednesday, June 17, to Sunday, June 21.
All shows at Main Street Landing in Burlington. Single tickets $34-54; season subscriptions $119-317. vermontstage.org
The original print version of this article was headlined “In Play | After 31 years, grit, devotion and generosity keep the curtain rising at Vermont Stage”
This article appears in Sep 10-16 2025.
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