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The Aerosmith tribute band Draw the Line drew an enthusiastic crowd to Akron’s Lock 3 Park on May 28. | CONTRIBUTED

Akron rocks — again

Venues say their crowds are back and as excited as ever

YBDAN SHINGLER

Dad rock and all, the boys (and girls) are back in town at Akron’s live music and performance venues.

And local event promoters who are elding their rst live shows in nearly a year-and-a-half say the crowds are back, too.

Asked recently how he was doing, Akron Civic eatre executive director Howard Parr seemed to have to pause and take a breath.

“Doing great, actually,” Parr said with some re ection. “I’m happy to be back at it.”

Parr’s been “at it” since 2007 at the Civic, and at other venues before that, so he knows a thing or two about the local live entertainment scene. After about a 15-month hiatus when the Civic had no shows due to COVID, Parr said he has been more than happy to return to serving audiences — and ecstatic to see they haven’t left him.

“What we’re seeing across the board is the numbers are basically what they would have been pre-pandemic, or better,” Parr said. at includes not only the Civic, he said, but Lock 3 Park next door to the south, where he books performances, and the new, 200-plus capacity Knight Stage that opened this year in the Whitelaw Building in the Bowery District next door.

“We just had two really good weekends in a row,” Parr said. Recent events such as the band Midnight Star’s performance at Lock 3, the Akron Pride Festival’s Drag Battle on the Civic’s main stage and the Say it Loud live-theater event on the Knight stage have all drawn big crowds, he said.

“We had the Journey tribute (E5C4P3 on July 2 at Lock 3), that had between 5,500 and 6,000 people,” he said. “We’ve been hitting those numbers when the weather’s been good.”

But even on May 28, on a rainy night with temps in the 40s, about 1,000 people came to see the Aerosmith tribute band Draw the Line at Lock 3, the city reports.

In the arts downtown district, developer Tony Troppe has dubbed his developments the “Blu Zone.” ey include Troppe’s Blue Jazz+ nightclub and Musica, both on East Market Street, and Maiden Lane Live!, an outdoor stage that Troppe opened nearby at the end of March.

“We’ve packed the house,” Troppe said. “ e other night we had 300-plus people (at Musica) for Dear Hunter. It was very encouraging to see the line wrapped around the building.” e show by Dear Hunter, a progressive rock band from Rhode Island, was canceled in 2020, but Troppe said he didn’t have to refund many tickets.

“Folks had tickets from 2020 and a lot of them held their tickets and waited for them to return. Plus, we sold another 200 or so tickets,” Troppe said.

Now Troppe said he’s enthusiastically booking more acts for all of his venues through the rest of the year, because he’s con dent the crowds will keep coming. He said Blue Jazz+ is preparing to return in the fall, after he reopens his BLU-tique hotel at the corner of Main and Market streets. He opened the hotel in January 2020 to enthusiastic reviews, only to have to close it in March due to COVID.

“We have a great lineup at Musica. We had our third show this past week, and we’re gearing up for a great summer,” Troppe said. “We have a number of great shows lined up for the summer at our Maiden Lane venue. ... e hotel’s going to be reopening the rst week of August, and Blue Jazz+ should be coming online for our seventh anniversary” in November. e return of live entertainment also is evident in the listings on the SummitLive365 website run by the arts-support organization ArtsNow in Akron. e site lets area artists and venues list their upcoming events for free.

In February 2020, just before the pandemic struck, the site listed 217 events. at number plummeted to just 67 events the next month, March, before reaching a nadir of just 33 events in December. is year, the numbers have been going back up, with 78 live events listed in May and another 75 in the rst 23 days of June, the latest gures available.

ArtsNow executive director Nicole Mullet said venues that have reopened are doing well, and more venues are opening all the time, but with an additional emphasis on safety. It will take a few months for the entire scene to be back in swing, she predicted.

“As we approach fall, I think we’ll see seasonal openings return to normal,” Mullet said.

It’s not as easy as just booking a band, stocking the bar and reopening the doors, according to Mullet and others.

“We are gearing up to reopen. We’ve had every service contractor in the universe in over the last few days getting all our equipment ready and our (air) lters cleaned,” said Jill Bacon Madden, owner and “chief vibe o cer” at Jilly’s Music Room on North Main Street.

Bacon Madden said she has been working with other clubs nationally to develop safety protocols for reopening that she’ll apply at her club and share with other venue owners. But it has been a challenge for some venues, because being safe often requires investing in equipment, and owners have had to guess for well over a year about when the pandemic would lift enough for them to bring in revenue again.

“We all thought the pandemic was going to last about six weeks,” Bacon Madden said. “ en we thought all the health guidelines would still be in place and we were preparing for the worst. ... Now all the protocols and guidelines are done, at least for now.”

Many venue owners and operators also weren’t expecting to go from an allowed capacity of 25% to 100% all at once, as happened when Ohio lifted its restrictions on gatherings on June 2.

“We were at 25% capacity, we thought maybe we’d go to 50% and then 75%, but all of a sudden ... all of the restrictions were gone,” said Akron Civic eatre’s Parr.

But that’s a happy challenge. Parr and other venue operators say they’re mostly just glad to be back to work and proud of the way people in their industry stuck together.

“We all, as an industry, worked together: the bands, the managers, the agents and the venues,” Parr said. “Nobody was a jerk.”

“It's one thing to say, ‘Well, I'm not going to take a minimum wage job to go to college,’ ” he said. “It's another thing to say, ‘I'm not going to take a job that pays me $20 an hour to go to college.’”

Diacon projects Kent State will come “very close” to meeting its goal of enrolling a freshman class of about 4,000 students. Fall 2020’s full-time enrollment dropped 4%. KSU has the largest full-time enrollment in the region, at about 27,000 students.

Like their peers, Kent o cials got creative with outreach to prospective students. It included efforts such as hosting prospective student events at drive-in movie theaters. ere’s the new “Flashes Go Further” scholarship, which will cover unmet need for in-state freshmen and sophomores who have an expected family contribution of $10,000 or less. Juniors and seniors will be eligible for some aid, too.

Diacon estimated the university will see a decline in returning students, though. It goes back, at least reportedly for some, to the job market. He has heard about students in professional programs who have been o ered full employment from summer internships even before graduation. e job market is a ecting students at Cleveland State University, too. Jonathan Wehner, vice president and dean of admissions, enrollment management, and student success, remains “cautiously optimistic” for the university’s projections.

Cleveland State saw its full-time enrollment drop 2% to about 12,112 students in fall 2020. Wehner said models for the upcoming semester come in somewhere between being at year-over-year or down a low single-digit percentage.

“Students seem to be really slow in their decision-making,” he said. “ ey de nitely seem to be taking their time and waiting up until the last minute.”

International student enrollment is projected to rise. at’s helpful, as those students typically pay full price. Like Kent, CSU also projects a drop in returning students. Wehner said that’s partially due to the university’s six-year graduation rate crossing 50% for the rst time.

“ at's a great, great thing,” he said. “We're graduating students faster, but that also means that students stay a little bit less time.”

Wehner added the amount of transfer students aren’t where they would have been before the pandemic. Community colleges were hit the hardest during COVID, as enrollment fell at those institutions by 9.5% nationwide last fall.

It’s too early to tell exactly how things will shake out at Lakeland Community College, according to Stephanie Brown, the college’s assistant provost for strategic retention initiatives. Similar to other two-year institutions, she said Lakeland will see a lot of enrollment activity in August.

Enrollment at Lakeland is trending down, though. Even with increased marketing and outreach to prospective students, it’ll probably clock in at a single-digit drop. Fulltime enrollment fell 19% last fall.

“ e one thing that we do have control over is how we support our current students, how we retain them, the services that we have in place for those students,” Brown said.

One of the few local institutions to enroll more students last fall was Ursuline College. e Pepper Pike campus’ full-time enrollment grew 6%, rising from 817 to 866 students.

Some graduate programs are “struggling a bit,” said Susan Dileno, vice president for enrollment management. But she expects more growth this fall in terms of new rsttime students. e incoming class is expected to have roughly 124 students, up from 102 last fall.

She said the college is committed to keeping and growing Ursuline’s hold on the region. e school historically has drawn the majority of its students from Northeast Ohio.

“A lot of schools have kind of let that slip,” she said. “We try to remain pretty aggressive and be in the forefront of students’ minds.”

Dileno can quickly tick o a few of what the college views as its strengths: It’s a women-focused institution, highly personal and a good value.

But when it comes to higher education options, Northeast Ohio is a crowded market. ere’s a lot of competition as administrators focus on how to distinguish themselves from their peers to attract more students.

“ at's what keeps me up at night, you know,” Dileno said. “Really trying to get a scan of what other colleges are doing or thinking, strategizing in terms of how we keep our market share.”

Amy Morona: amy.morona@crain. com, (216) 771-5229, @AmyMorona