Downtown, it’s rockin’

A strange artistic alchemy is taking place on the streets of downtown Spokane. Almost without fanfare, a three-block area has blossomed into a true, big-city-style arts-and-entertainment district. The catalyst, without question, has been the Big Easy Concert House, which opened in February and has regularly drawn crowds of 1,000 to 1,500 (even on many weeknights) to its location a block west of the Davenport Hotel.

With The Met next door, the Fox Theater across the street and CenterStage dinner theater and jazz club a block away, these four venues have the potential to create a critical mass of nightlife. Serious obstacles remain (see accompanying story), but in many ways this potential is already being realized.

Three anecdotes illustrate the changing face of the downtown entertainment scene:

Insanity and opera: One night in May, a well-dressed 50-something couple walked down Sprague Avenue past a long queue of young people, many wearing grotesque masks and/or clown makeup. The couple stopped and asked one of the mask-wearers, “What’s going on?”

“The Insane Clown Posse concert at the Big Easy,” he said. “What about you? Where are you going?”

The couple pointed down the block.

” ‘Don Pasquale,’ ” they said. “The Spokane Opera.”

“Cool,” said the young man.

“That’s the kind of culture shock you get all the time in New York, probably, but it’s nice to see it here,” said Michael Smith, manager of The Met.

Sidewalk synergy: One night in April, the members of Les Ballets Africains, the national dance company of the Republic of Guinea, were unloading outside The Met. On that same sidewalk, Toots and the Maytals, reggae legends, were unloading their show at the Big Easy.

Before long, passers-by were treated to an unusual sight: a group of African dancers teaching Toots and the Maytals a few Guinean dance steps on the sidewalks of Spokane.

“If you go out on a Friday or Saturday night or any concert night, and just look up and down the street, it’s alive,” said Greg Marchant, general manager of the Big Easy.

The Joan Baez buzz: In March, a buzz began to circulate during the Ratdog concert at the Big Easy. A certain folk legend been sighted in the crowd.

Before long, Joan Baez was up on the stage, singing three songs with Bob Weir, Grateful Dead veteran and frontman for Ratdog. It turned out that Baez had just finished her sold-out concert at The Met. Then she walked next door to the Big Easy to see her old friends.

“To me, that was ultimate cool,” said Smith. “That was always one of my dreams, that the artists would mingle between the two venues.”

“I’ve done hundreds of shows in my career, and every so often, I am walking around in the back of the room saying, ‘This is magic,’ ” said Marchant. “This was one of those times.”

These examples illustrate the kind of synergy that happens when several entertainment venues are clustered together in a city. Another kind of synergy has also been in evidence, which might better be described as economic.

“I like seeing things happening around here,” said Smith. “I went out after a show to have a drink with friends, and the Peacock Room (at the Davenport) was full. The bar at the Lusso Hotel (Cavallino’s) was full. Niko’s Wine Bar was full. I look at that, and I say, ‘Yeah, this is really awesome.’ ”

“I like the idea that you can go downtown on some particular night and not have an exact idea where you’re going,” said John Hancock, executive director of the Spokane Symphony, which owns the Fox. “You’re sure to find something interesting and fun.”

CenterStage, with its Upstage Supper Club specializing in jazz, gives people a place to go for some post-concert music and as a destination in itself.

“We’ve provided a nonsmoking home for jazz in Spokane,” said Tim Behrens, artistic director of CenterStage. “Over 100 different musicians have played for us in the supper club, and 95 percent are local.”

The Big Easy is the 800-pound gorilla of this group, drawing masses of people downtown who may otherwise have never set foot there. In some extreme cases, the Big Easy is drawing masses of people who don’t even live in the Inland Northwest.

“More than half of the crowd for the Pixies concert flew in for that show,” said Marchant, referring to the reunion tour of the beloved indie-rock act. Tickets sold out in 16 minutes, many to fans all over the country.

Even on nonconcert weekend nights, the streets around the Big Easy are jammed with people. The two dance club nights, Club Mardi Gras on Friday nights and Club Fusion on Saturday nights, are routinely drawing 1,300 people, which is club capacity. Marchant said nearby restaurants and bars are all benefiting, despite the fact that the Big Easy has its own restaurant and bar, Bourbon Street.

“We can only fit 186 people in our restaurant and we’re putting 1,500 people in the (main) room,” said Marchant.

It works the other way, too. Marchant said that every night The Met has an event, Bourbon Street fills up.

Yet 800-pound gorillas have been known to raise some havoc as well. Police calls have gone up dramatically in the area, as a thousand concert- and club-goers — some with a few too many drinks under the belt — are disgorged onto the street. The similarity to New Orleans’ rowdy Bourbon Street doesn’t end at the name.

And the Big Easy’s presence has not exactly been entirely beneficial to The Met, where the young Bing Crosby once honed his act.

“I’ve been doing more theatrical shows, more chamber performances, and less rock ‘n’ roll shows,” said Smith. “I don’t believe it’s a serious problem. A lot of those kind of shows were not really appropriate for The Met anyway. I did them because I wanted to reach out to all of the demographics of Spokane.”

Yet Smith, who originally was a key player in bringing the Big Easy onto that block, is clearly smarting over losing some shows to the Big Easy. The Big Easy is owned by Boise-based Bravo Entertainment, which also books acts into The Met, the Opera House and the Arena.

“Michael has been doing a great job of keeping that room full,” said Marchant. “In the past we booked maybe 10 shows a year there, and he may not be getting those. But then again, we brought Steven Wright (the comedian) here. So there’s a show we realized would play better in The Met than possibly in our room.”

The Fox’s capacity after renovation, which the symphony hopes to begin next year, will be 1,725, in the same league as the Big Easy. Yet it will have a vastly different feel.

“The Fox is a beautiful theater, and there are a large number of acts in certain genres that will prefer to play that type of house,” said Marchant. “We may promote shows in that room. There’s sure to be lots of fine arts in that room.”

Hancock sees the proximity of the Big Easy as mostly positive.

“The Big Easy has certainly enlivened the scene there,” said Hancock. “It’s a blend of people, just like a real city. And that general development is good, not just in the small sense, but in the sense of being what this city needs to be in order to be stable and grow and be aggressive.”

Marchant even dreams of luring the symphony over to the Big Easy one day.

“They could do a pops show, the music of Metallica or something,” said Marchant. “Open up their listening audience to a whole new demographic.”

A mix of entertainment venues, in both size and style, certainly helps promoters to bring in more acts. The Big Easy filled a niche that Marchant calls “somewhere between mini-arena and nightclub,” previously lacking in Spokane.

He said fans of, for instance, the Roots or the Insane Clown Posse had to drive to Seattle, or at least the Gorge, to see those bands before.

As for style, The Met and the Big Easy couldn’t present a bigger contrast. The Met is a classic “velvet seat” theater, as it is referred to in the trade. The Big Easy’s seats certainly aren’t velvet. In fact, they’re more like nonexistent. For many shows, the only seats are a few stools. At many shows, most of the patrons stand. However, the Big Easy can also bring in as many as 750 portable chairs, which it did for the Ron White comedy show.

“It just depends on the demographics,” said Marchant. “There are some shows that we love people to just get up and dance, and a lot of the artists do as well. They love that open floor, because it packs full of energy and excitement.”

That’s not the only contrast. At the Big Easy, patrons can buy food and drink at the bar in back of the hall. At The Met, the patrons stay put in their seats.

Smith thinks this may eventually tilt the balance back toward The Met.

“A lot of acts have spent years trying to get out of the bars, and they find they’re in a bar situation again,” said Smith. “Having a bar in the back of the room is not conducive to a really serious performer. No seating — that’s not very conducive to listening.”

Some artists have even complained from stage about the hubbub.

“If an artist prefers a soft-seat house, that (The Met) is a great option for us,” said Marchant. “We can keep bringing people downtown and even do a pre- or post-concert party here. We can put them into a velvet-seat house, when that’s the demographic that wants a velvet seat.”

That’s the kind of synergy that Smith dreams of as well.

“We’ve got almost 2,200 seats on this block,” said Smith. “You can get an act like Nickel Creek (a bluegrass group that recently filled the Big Easy), and they can do an acoustic set live over here, and then they can go over there and do an electric set. In each place, you put up a closed-circuit TV screen so people can see the other show. Those are the kinds of things I’d like to see in the future.”

Despite such enthusiasm, the future is, in fact, murky for such a lively district.

One venue, the Fox Theater, is mostly dark right now and its rebirth hangs on raising another $17 million.

Two other venues are in a kind of legal limbo. The Met will soon be auctioned off by a bankruptcy court because of the financial struggles of its owner, Metropolitan Mortgage, although it probably will survive as a performance venue. CenterStage is in the midst of a legal wrangle over its lease.

CenterStage has financial challenges beyond that. It needs to raise $130,000 in donations each of its first three years until the theater can become self-sustaining. Raising money might be even more of a challenge with words like “eviction” and “lawsuit” hanging in the air.

“Like every other arts group, we never know if we’re going to make it through the summer or not,” said Behrens.

Yet optimism prevails. He’s already programming a 2004-2005 season.

Meanwhile, Marchant is happy that the Big Easy has been a hit so far.

“I’m not going to say that we singlehandedly rebuilt this district,” said Marchant. “The Davenport and the Steam Plant and the Railside Center (the arts block that contains CenterStage) were here well before us. But we’ve brought more people downtown to appreciate these things around us.”

He is also aware that the Big Easy has had one other advantage.

“Plus, we’re new,” he said. “It’s nice to be honeymooning.”