A Skylight prediction

The Skylight Opera Theatre is just awakening from the worst public relations nightmare any Milwaukee arts organization has ever suffered. (You know — Theisen fired, artists outraged, Dillner resigns, artists triumphant. No need to recap when the whole story, except for Dillner’s exit Wednesday, is in a nutshell right here.)

Will the disastrous summer torpedo the company’s 50th season, which begins Sept. 18? It will not; on the contrary, the Dillner nightmare is about to become a dream.

Think about it:

The Skylight’s name has never been so prominently placed before the public. The New York Times even sent Daniel Wakin to town to write about the mess. Bloggers, the Journal Sentinel, WUWM, and even AM radio squawkers have weighed in on it. The Skylight might have been dragged through the mud, but people are looking at it as never before.

The Skylight’s financial troubles were unknown even to some members of its overlarge board of directors. Now every potential donor knows that the building needs expensive repair and maintenance and the company needs funds to pay key personnel. Now that they know, they might help.

The perception is this: The good guys — the performers who love the Skylight — won. The bad guys — resigned managing director Eric Dillner and allied board members, who might have destroyed the character of the company in an effort to save it financially — lost. That might not be entirely fair, but those are the labels that stick.

That is a powerful story to pitch to potential donors. A legendary Skylight personage, Colin Cabot, is here to pitch that story. I understand that the emergency fund-raising is off to a strong start.

The uncommonly committed corps of Milwaukee actors, singers and musicians, who led the protest against Dillner and for artistic director Bill Theisen, have turned their energies toward fund-raising and ticket-selling. Benefit concerts and recitals are already taking shape. Of course they’ve set up an online sign-up sheet for volunteers.

The subscribers who demanded refunds because of the unpleasantness will return to the fold without prompting. They are the most committed and informed among the Skylight audience, and they know full well that Theisen and their stage favorites are back.

The Skylight marketing team can call upon those subscribers, just as they are calling on the performers, to help spread the word and pitch the company’s shows to their friends in ways they could not in a more normal year. The Third Ward’s little opera company will have more volunteers than ever selling its tickets, and those volunteers will be more fired-up than ever.

I know from comments at my old Journal Sentinel blog and now at ThirdCoast that many people who have never even attended a Skylight show got caught up in the soap opera that began when Theisen and four others were fired on June 16. Some of those people will buy a ticket or two, if only to see what all the shouting’s been about.

Thus can disaster become opportunity. When all ends well, there is no such thing as bad publicity.