Buckfield man touts arts locally

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ROCKPORT – Many of the 1,500 people who call the Oxford County town of Buckfield home shop elsewhere, work elsewhere, and – until recently – sought entertainment elsewhere.

On Tuesday, Michael Miclon, founder of the Odd Fellows Theater in Buckfield, located between the busy service centers of Lewiston-Auburn and South Paris, told the story of creating home-grown entertainment in his community at a conference, “Creating a Better Maine: Building Strong Communities Through the Arts and Humanities,” sponsored by the Maine Community Foundation, at the Samoset Resort.

The one-day conference was held to explore ways in which Maine communities are improving their local economy and social conditions through innovative arts, culture and humanities programs.

In 1996, Miclon purchased Buckfield’s old Odd Fellows Hall for $20,000 – outbidding two other prospective buyers – with the dream of converting it into a theater. For a year and a half, a sign outside the building read, “Coming soon, a theater near you.”

After pumping $120,000 more into the building, Miclon, who is obviously a born “ham,” in the best sense of the word, recruited friends and fellow performers to create “The Early Evening Show,” a live performance modeled on a late-night talk show – except there are no TV cameras.

At Tuesday’s conference, Miclon showed a videotape of a segment on the theater that appeared on CBS’ “Sunday Morning on CBS” program last year. “The Early Evening Show” packed the 156-seat theater, giving the audience a smorgasbord of entertainment, including the antics of Miclon as host, who seems like he could sit in for Jay Leno at a moment’s notice.

In the videotape, a live rock band plays as Miclon is introduced, and he runs along the front row, shaking hands with people as if he is indeed a celebrity, and not the guy everyone has known for years.

The fact that he is someone that everyone has known for years, Miclon believes, is key to the success of “The Early Evening Show” and the theater. It was important for people to associate him with the place, he said, because they knew and trusted him as a performer.

Using a formula that has worked since vaudeville through the days of Ed Sullivan to Leno and Letterman, Miclon offers a mix of guests, including musicians, poets, jugglers and even a ballet dancer. He said he wasn’t sure how the ballet would go over, but one man, after the show, confessed to Miclon that “the ballet was cool.”

Miclon and his volunteer company perform the show the first Saturday night of each month. He said one truck driver adjusts his delivery schedule so as not to miss it.

The theater, which also is home to Miclon, his wife and their three sons, holds a couple of other performances each month.

The concept is a successful example of the joys of live, local entertainment winning out over TV and the Internet, but Miclon said it has come at a price. He estimates that he invests about $25,000 of his own income in the theater each year.

Miclon’s talents as impresario were recently confirmed beyond the realm of his Buckfield theater: he has been named director of the Maine Festival.

Bob Bahr, executive director of The Grand Auditorium in Ellsworth, was part of the same panel discussion that featured Miclon. The Grand is a well-established cultural and arts center, having been founded 25 years ago.

The key to surviving and thriving, Bahr said, is to know the community and give it what it wants. He said that though he personally loves chamber music, he would not presume to feature that in the theater.

It would be presumptuous, he said, to believe “[It is] my role to teach the great unwashed masses about classical chamber music.”

Instead, Bahr said, community arts groups should create dialogues with residents and form partnerships with other organizations in town to learn what is sought by audiences.

“Don’t build a product and then find a market,” he recommended.

The Grand is working on long-range plans, trying to plan its role in the community as far out as 2030. Arts groups should adapt programming for an aging audience, Bahr suggested, reflecting that demographic reality.

Just down the road from The Grand is the Schoodic Peninsula, home to the fledgling Schoodic Arts for All group. Cynthia Thayer, a novelist and organic farmer who serves as president of the organization’s board of directors, said the group formed three years ago. It produces an ambitious schedule of 74 arts, crafts and performance workshops over a two-week period each summer, as well as 28 free evening and noon performances.

Thayer said the response to the shows has shown the need for them.

“People are starting to say, ‘Wow, this is my first live performance,'” she said of the local audiences.

Some of the workshops are aimed at bringing adults and children together. Thayer said cultural and athletic events create age segregation, which is not good for community-building.

In Dover-Foxcroft, Rollin Thurlow and some of his friends grew tired of seeing one historic building after another succumb to the wrecking ball. Thurlow owns Northwoods Canoe Co., and he and friends decided to act when they heard the old theater in town might be demolished.

Even though the theater part had been vacant since 1971, the building was in decent shape, Thurlow said. The plan was to show movies there, since the nearest theaters are an hour and more away, but now the group is considering all options.

The group was able to get 120 seats the University of Maine was going to throw away, but the theater does not have electricity or public bathrooms.

Thurlow said the search for grant funding has forced the group to become more organized, creating a formal board of directors, which he reluctantly agreed has been a good thing.

“It’s still a very painful process for us to go through all this stuff,” he said, but necessary for the effort to succeed. Thurlow has been in touch with Bahr and others to learn how to get the theater up and running.