Fairfield County’s Best Kept Secret: The Anatomy Of A Concert Park

By Shannon Hicks

DANBURY — Concert days at Ives Concert Park, one of the best-kept secrets in Fairfield County for live concerts by major names, begin early and end late. The non-profit park opened its 2000 summer concert season last week with two concerts, and volunteers and staff members have primed themselves for five more big shows before the season closes in September.

Ives Concert Park covers 39 acres of lawn and woods, hiking trails and picnic groves on the west-side campus of Western Connecticut State University. It is also home to an open air amphitheater where concerts are presented during summer months.

The idea for the concert park was born on the centenary of Charles Ives’ birthday, July 4, 1974. On that day, 7,000 people visited the park to enjoy a program performed by Leonard Bernstein, Michael Tilson Thomas, and the American Symphony Orchestra. The all-Ives program honored of the Danbury native.

A permanent gazebo-like stage was built on the edge of the pond at the park in 1984. The pavilion, as the stage is called, was built right over the water, and a small moat continues to wind its way around the open building, dividing the front of the stage from the first rows of reserved seats. Today a pair of fountains situated behind the pavilion adds to the beauty of the venue’s natural setting.

Folding chairs serve as the seats for the front section of the concert area, with a soft grade sloping up from the stage serving as the incline between rows.

Behind the reserved seats stands a two-level metal tower where sound boards are set up, and on the back of the tower is a Jumbo StageScreen™ which provides a direct video view of what is happening on the stage to everyone on the lawn, the open area for seating behind the reserved seats. The lawn can handle a crowd of up to 3,800 people.

The park, production manager Bob Connor admits, was originally designed for the symphony concerts for which it became known, but a growing spectrum of musical styles has been gaining popularity at the venue for over a decade. The park now offers concerts that are suitable to a wider range of music fans than ever.

Over the course of the last 16 years, The Ives has been home to more than 300 performances by national and international performers, covering pop/rock, folk, blues/R&B, country, jazz/swing, Broadway plays, and classical music.

Even with all this already under its belt, production manager Bob Conner says the concert park remains “Fairfield County’s best-kept secret.” The venue is not as well known as other concert locations in the state. The Newtown resident’s hope is to change all that, and his best form of advertisement is positive word of mouth from people who continue to enjoy good experiences while visiting the venue.

The concert park opened for the season on July 4 this year with its annual presentation of a Fourth of July Fireworks and Concert Extravaganza.

Last weekend, the call for the stage crew was 10 am Saturday morning. Gates for the concert opened at 6 pm that evening, and it took the entire day for the crew to get the park ready.

Crew members were expected to arrive at the concert venue at that hour to begin a non-stop regimen of setting up the concert park to receive up to 5,500 audience members for a concert that was not scheduled to begin until 8 o’clock that evening.

The preparations at the concert park on July 8 were for the first guest performer of the season, Natalie Merchant. Concerts this year are also scheduled by The Moody Blues, Jethro Tull; The Temptations, Martha Reeves and The Vandellas and The Marvelettes; and Smokey Robinson. The B.B. King Blues Festival will close the season on September 4.

Fourteen local crew members and about eight members of the crew that travels with the performer were at the park by mid-Saturday morning, ranging in age from teenagers on up. The crew was planning to be on hand until about 2 am Sunday, “if we’re lucky” enough to get out that early, said Bob Connor.

Mr Connor is the production manager and grant administrator for the non-profit center. Now in his fourth summer with Ives Concert Park, Mr Connor has worked his way up from a part-time job as a crew member, to assistant production manager, to his current position. His duties begin with going over the contracts for each show.

He arrives at the concert park before the band’s crews arrive for each show, providing himself “about a five-minute breather,” he says, before the long day ahead begins. Once the day’s crews arrive, Mr Connor’s job is to oversee the setting up, presentation, and then breakdown of the show.

“After the shows are over, I make sure this place looks like it did before the crews ever showed up,” Mr Connor said this week from his office.

The work of setting up the stage, sound tower, and seating areas of the concert park moved steadily on Saturday. No one was seen standing still for very long. Penny Fleck and Ray Lanford did not allow that to happen.

Ms Fleck has been working as local crew across the state for four years; Mr Lanford, an employee of SFX, has been working in the music industry for nearly 20 years and is now head of hospitality backstage, which is part of the production team at the SNET Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford. He was working in Danbury last weekend because “it was some extra money” and he knew he could help out. Mr Lanford also works regularly at Hartford Civic Center and Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville.

1As a local crew member, Penny Fleck was concerned with getting pieces of stage equipment out of loading vans and onto the stage or up the hill to the sound tower. From there, Natalie Merchant’s crew took over with setting up the equipment and doing the fine-tuning.

Because she has been working steadily at a number of venues, Ms Fleck is familiar with where pieces of equipment belong, and she knows when they need to be set up. While Mr Connor oversaw the entire operation Saturday, Ms Fleck took care of directing the local crew in getting pieces unloaded and at their proper location for the band’s crew.

“We both work at a couple different places, so we know what’s going on,” Ms Fleck said Saturday afternoon, referring to the jobs she and Mr Lanford have done in the past.

“Knowing what you’re doing, and working with people who know what to do, makes a big difference,” Mr Lanford added. “Even if you are working with people who don’t know what they’re doing, if they’re willing to listen, to follow directions, then things go very smoothly.”

Mr Lanford had arrived in Danbury by 10 am. He made the drive from his home in Wallingford, and fully expected to be working for well over 12 hours. On top of that, he had been working the previous night at the Oakdale theatre for a concert by the band Earth, Wind & Fire. This week he was scheduled to work hospitality at the Oakdale for The Beach Boys and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

“This job is a lot of long hours, and very little sleep,” he said.

A Force Of Volunteers

Ives Concert Park also relies on an army volunteers to keep it running smoothly from an audience member’s point of view. All of the ushers, ticket takers, raffle ticket sellers, information booth workers, and even those who drive the golf carts that help all patrons who need assistance get around, are unpaid help.

Ticket sales account for only 50 percent of the Ives Center’s annual budget, and contributions from foundations, sponsors, area businesses, and individuals fill in the rest of the park’s operating budget. One of the reasons the concert park is able to maintain reasonable ticket prices (yes, reasonable: the average price of a ticket this season at Ives Concert Park remains in the mid-to-upper-$20 range, while tickets for major concerts at most other venues begin around $30 and go from there, and that does not include parking fees — something for which The Ives does not charge) for its concerts is that the majority of its staff is comprised of volunteers.

Susan Scaffidi, the on-site volunteer coordinator, says if it weren’t for the volunteers, things would look and feel much different at the concert park.

“Without these people, the park would have to pay others to do this work, and that money would have to come from raised ticket prices,” Ms Scaffidi said this week. “These volunteers provide many of the services for patrons who come here.”

The jobs sound easy enough but as with most volunteer work, there are duties handled by the Ives volunteers that are not always realized, nor appreciated, by the public. Some of the jobs require several hours of standing, and sometimes the weather doesn’t cooperate.

“We had The Beach Boys play here last year in 103-degree weather, and everyone was expected to work that day,” said Ms Scaffidi, who began working as a volunteer herself during the summer of 1988. “We put on shows rain or shine.”

Volunteers arrive at the park 30 minutes before the gate opens to the public (which is two hours before show time), and are expected to be on hand until at least 10 pm on concert nights. Golf cart drivers must remain on site until the last patron who needs assistance is helped out of the park. “They need a bit of stamina,” she pointed out.

Other jobs can be somewhat fast-paced or hectic, especially for the ticket-takers and ushers during the hour before a performance begins. That’s when everyone is trying to get in through the gate and find their seats, Ms Scaffidi said.

Volunteers receive benefits for their time, including discounts on food and any non-alcoholic beverages when attending shows; discounts on lawn tickets for an immediate family member; and discounts on merchandise at the Ives Gift Shop.

So why all the hard work by everyone behind the scenes? Because in the course of 15 years and 300 majors concerts, over 400,000 people have discovered one of the best outdoor concert venues in the state. Until the general population realizes what we have right here in our back yard, Ives Concert Park will continue to fine-tune its already first-rate presentation for its growing family of audience members.

Information on tickets for any of this season’s shows can be obtained by calling Ives Concert Park’s box office, 837-9226, or visiting the Web site www.ivesconcertpark.com. For additional information concerning volunteer opportunities contact Cynthia DuJack, director of operations, at the box office.