Listen to Sam Sweet
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Sam Sweet
Managing Director
Signature Theatre
Sam Sweet is an architect. Well, not really; but as a theatre's managing director, Sweet is asked to help define the environment and then help build it. He has spent much of his professional career building the future of theatres, preparing them for solid, sustained success. Sweet has masterfully guided arts organizations through expansions, laying the foundation and infrastructure to realize artistic visions.
Since 2001, he's been the managing director at Signature Theatre, in partnership with artistic director Eric Shaeffer. When Sweet came to Signature Theatre, it was housed in a converted garage and Schaeffer was looking for a permanent home for it in one of the county's construction projects. Over five years, Sam led Signature through a successful capital campaign, and Signature's home is now a 48,000-square-foot, two-theatre complex in the Shirlington Village area of Arlington. That alone would have qualified as a success. But the construction and move, while a considerable feat, represented only part of the challenges Sweet faced.
Signature had developed a reputation for artistic excellence and critical acclaim as an incubator for new and re-interpreted musical theatre. But the theatre lacked important internal underpinnings -- the financial management, marketing, fundraising, and human resource management -- to keep the organization strong and well positioned as a national source for musical theatre excellence.
Sweet set out to observe and understand Signature's culture first, listening to staff, without instituting wholesale changes. Over six years his quiet, steady leadership helped bring necessary changes in financial management, staffing, and customer service; he kept staff and board motivated and focused during difficult construction delays. The budget grew from $1.8 to $5.5 million; subscribers increased from 3,600 to more than 5,000, and branding work and surveys resulted in a 90 percent subscriber renewal rate. "Signature has been a successful organization artistically. I used that as a platform to build and promote a stronger organization," says Sweet.
While the artistic director is usually seen as the creative force of a theatre, articulating the artistic vision, Sweet, an art history major and MBA, feels that he gets to use both right and left brain thinking as managing director. "I know Eric's goals," he says. "I'm trying to tie my vision to his. It's the creative end of my job which makes me feel artistically fulfilled." Looking at the bigger picture, the larger goals, requires a different lens than that of the artistic director, who is often focused on a single production at a time. "Building an organization," says Sweet, "requires you to look back over a couple of years to get a sense of just how much everyone coming to the organization has been able to accomplish."
Sweet feels confident that Signature, in addition to a wonderful artistic project, now has the right place and most of the elements of the right organization for continued success. Building the theatre was a big goal, and now it's on to the next big goal: developing new works of musical theatre, which provides much opportunity – and risk. But it's another challenge he's up for. "Signature thinks big," Sweet says. "I think the last five or six years' progress should give everyone confidence about our future."