Peter Cathie White digs into a gallon-sized glass jug filled with brown crystals and offers his guest what he describes as a “special” coffee.
“We Australians are really into our coffee,” the executive director of the Arts Club Theatre Co. says with a distinctive Aussie drawl.
He then mixes granules of what turns out to be Moccona instant coffee.
“I flew this in with me the last time I went home to Australia,” Cathie White says, settling behind his desk in a small office above the Arts Club Theatre Co.’s box office on Granville Island.
A cabinet filled with dozens of model airplanes sits in a corner, providing both ambience and a hint at another of Cathie White’s passions outside the world of theatre.
When Cathie White, now 47, came to Vancouver in 1997, it was to manage a travel agency as part of what was then the fledgling, three-year-old Flight Centre North America. He had worked part time for that subsidiary’s parent, Flight Centre Travel Group, in Perth while completing a degree in musical theatre at Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.
When relaying anecdotes from his time at that prestigious theatre school Down Under, Cathie White mentions that his time at the school overlapped with that of celebrated actor Hugh Jackman, who was two years ahead of him.
“The two of us just had different career trajectories,” Cathie White said with a laugh.
Attending theatre school turned out to be valuable training – not only because it thoroughly grounded him in his current field but also because it has earned him respect among the hundreds of actors, stagehands and even office staff that the Arts Club employs.
Because he did not initially get into theatre school, Cathie White decided instead to study journalism at the University of Queensland. Yet once he had his journalism degree in hand, he realized that writing was not what he wanted to pursue.
It was 1988 and he was in Flight Centre’s home city of Brisbane, Australia, so he applied for a job. He was hired as a travel consultant.
“I didn’t think I would stay there very long, but life takes you in different directions than you might think,” Cathie White said. “Flight Centre back in the late ’80s had about 20 shops, and you could move up quickly, so I was managing a store within two years.”
Later, in Vancouver, he became Flight Centre North America’s vice-president of marketing for Western Canada.
“When I moved to the Arts Club, in 2003, I became the manager of marketing, which was a bit of a downgrade from what I’d been doing, but I really wanted to work for a theatre company,” he said.
Within a year he was promoted to director of marketing, and he stayed in that role until November 2014, when he replaced executive director Howard Jang, who had left to become director of Simon Fraser University’s Woodward’s cultural unit.
Jang said that he acted as a mentor to Cathie White and had encouraged the Arts Club’s board through the years to consider Cathie White as his eventual replacement.
“The board did a thoughtful search, a national one, and I’m sure there was interest from across the country and abroad, but Peter is the right choice for where the Arts Club is going,” Jang said. “He has a great marketing mind, knows how to build a team and knows how to build loyalties with our market. I give him a lot of credit for the success we had, not just at the box office but also in our community.”
Since becoming executive director, Cathie White has focused primarily on increasing donations, particularly from subscribers.
Balancing the Arts Club’s $12 million operating budget is always a challenge, and, though the past few years have yielded small surpluses in the $400,000 range, the future is now less certain because the Arts Club is building a new theatre .
Dubbed the BMO Theatre Centre, the $22 million facility that the Arts Club will share with Bard on the Beach is set to open in late November and will feature new office space, rehearsal space and a new Goldcorp Stage.
The new structure, which will have four different seating configurations, is the culmination of a long-running capital campaign.
Actors who take part in the approximately 15 plays that the Arts Club produces for its three current stages have taken to rehearsing in hallways because the company has only one small rehearsal hall – even though it is Canada’s third-largest not-for-profit theatre company, after the Stratford Festival, and the Shaw Festival ranked by operating budget and number of performances.
“You can’t rehearse an upcoming show on the set of another show,” Cathie White said. “Look at the Godspell set now at the Granville Island stage – it has a railway track running down the middle.”
The Arts Club will continue to operate its 440-seat Granville Island stage and its 620-seat Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage but will stop using its 246-seat Revue Stage on Granville Island in September.
Owner Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC) has agreed to take back the Revue Stage’s lease and will seek a private administrator to rent the theatre out for events, CMHC spokesman Scott Fraser told BIV.
The Arts Club is also vacating office and production space on Granville Island.
Despite savings from unloading that leased space, Cathie White expects total operational costs at the BMO Theatre Centre to be at least $150,000 more per year than they are now.
Outside work, Cathie White spends time with his husband, Doug, and does as much exercise as he can to get back into shape.
“I was a size 38 waist two years ago and now I’m down to a size 33,” Cathie White said.
“I’ve got into cross fit and am taking a class. I also like to ski.”
–Courtesy of Business in Vancouver
