Before taking on the role of executive director at Skylight Music Theatre this year, Jack Lemmon had never been to Milwaukee, but now he’s tasked with steering one of its preeminent arts organizations. A former executive director of the Joffrey Ballet, the Louisville Ballet, the Colorado Ballet and the Birmingham Children’s Theatre, Lemmon spoke with Off The Cuff about his vision for Skylight and his first impressions of Milwaukee’s arts scene.
Were there any specific challenges you were asked to address when Skylight hired you?
I think one of the issues is—and this isn’t particularly a surprise—Skylight has not balanced its budget in a while. So one of my tasks coming in is to figure out how to make the business operations balance. We’re exploring that with the board and the staff and everybody else. It’s one of those fun moments in organizational history, I call them reflection points, where real change is possible, and you can set the pathway forward. I’ve done a lot of those in my career, and it’s always fun to come in and say, “OK, what do we want to be when we grow up?” Even though Skylight is almost 60 years old, this is a refreshing of who we are, and that’s a fun time.
It’s funny, that’s not how most people describe budget crunches. You rarely hear people describe making those tough decisions as “fun.”
Well, it would be wonderful if we were in a world where balancing budgets and stuff like that is not necessary, but it is. So it’s the case of building in creativity within the organization to deal with things. I trained as a musician, so I have that whole creative side, arts side to myself, but what I also find fun and creative is looking at how we can make what we do better. How can we encourage more people to come see us? How can we get more people to realize our value to the community and to increase their contributions? Skylight is one of those organizations that is so connected within the community that I really think it’s loved. We have a great history and an interesting history, and we’re bringing in 20,000 or 30,000 people a year into this facility, and people remember us. I’m still hearing stories about productions we did back in the ’60s. They’ll tell me we had this wonderful production, or that wonderful production, and it resides in people’s memories.
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You previously worked at the United Performing Arts Fund. Does having knowledge of how that organization works give you a leg up in a job like this? Its inner workings are a mystery to many people in the arts community.
It’s really not much of a mystery. I was there during the ’80s during the great culture wars in Washington, where the National Endowment was held up as everything that’s wrong with government, so it was an interesting time. What it does while you’re sitting there is you get a better sense of the matrix of the arts within the United States, and the connections between communities and within the communities. So I think that has absolutely shaped how I view things, because we’re all working toward the same things—finding partnerships in the community, doing things different ways. I think I’m probably much more collaborative than I might have been, because it does give you a different view. You know, Milwaukee has some great arts organizations that are known nationally, but I sometimes wonder if they are as well known locally.
Is that a problem unique to Milwaukee?
I don’t think it’s unique, but I think it’s a challenge. Somebody said Milwaukee does much better when somebody outside says it’s great than when Milwaukee people say it’s wonderful. You know, I’ve heard the orchestra and it’s an amazing orchestra—and I trained as a conductor and a trumpet player. It’s an incredible orchestra. And The Rep is fantastic, and I can go down the line. So I think as a cultural sector, we probably have to find ways of better communicating the value and uniqueness of Milwaukee’s culture assets.
