Branson, Missouri has been a musician’s punch line long enough. Long considered music’s equivalent of an elephant’s graveyard (and the actual home of The Beverly Hillbillies’ Clampett clan), this Ozark town is actually an entertainment destination that many in the live concert and event business would envy. The town is hardly huge — it’s barely 21 square miles with a population of 10,500, yet it welcomes more than 8 million visitors a year — some 80 percent of whom come for the shows at Branson’s 50 theaters with 64,000-plus seats — more than you’d find on Broadway. The city was formally incorporated in 1912, so it’s fitting that for Branson’s 100th anniversary, we take a look at what makes this town such a draw for live sound.
Large and Small
Not all of Branson’s theaters are at the cutting edge — many are small, with a single stage and relatively basic theatrical AV systems. But others are top-of-the-line. Mansion Entertainment, which owns the Oak Ridge Boys Theatre (formerly Glen Campbell’s home base), acquired the Mansion Theatre in 2011. That 3,000+-seat venue, used largely for theatrical presentations such as its current run of Peter Pan, came with a Meyer MILO PA system, EAW SM200iH monitors and Yamaha PM1D consoles at FOH and monitors, and production manager Marty Wilhite says an upgrade is in the planning stages. The Oak Ridge Boys Theater has L-Acoustics V-DOSC and KUDO PA components powered by QSC amplifiers, as well as 12 channels of Sennheiser SKM 5200 wireless mics. The Avid VENUE consoles there have Dolby Lake processing.
Wilhite has the characteristics that reflect Branson’s family-oriented qualities: he’s worked in the city’s entertainment infrastructure for more than 25 years, and his brother Larry is the GM and president of the parent company. He’s watched Branson evolve from being a local and regional whistle stop to the multi-venue destination it is today. It wasn’t a straight line — the city attracted national attention when TV news magazine 60 Minutes proclaimed Branson the “live music capital of the entire universe” in 1991 (a title more recently claimed by Austin, TX). Since then, Branson’s gone through several cycles of expansion and contraction. The last few years are emblematic of Branson’s bigger picture: several theaters have added new sound and other systems, while the largest venue of them all, the Grand Palace, currently languishes unused, with reports of water damage and changes of ownership.
Still, Branson has more live entertainment and music than its nearest competitor, Nashville, 350 miles to the east. It boasts 100 regular shows running for months — and in some cases years — at a time, and it’s become a regular stop for touring oldies acts whose most recent vintages are the 1970s and 1980s, with Kenny Loggins, Three Dog Night and the Moody Blues among those making recent appearances.
Today and Tomorrow
Branson has taken a hit from the economic downturn. It’s a destination most visitors drive to. The local airport gets one flight a day from Southwest Airlines, and the nearest airport serviced by multiple mainline carriers is 50 miles away. Meanwhile, rising gas prices, combined with Midwest job losses over the past four years, have cut into attendance, yet the visitor influx rose by three percent. A tornado that tore into the town on Feb. 29 did minor damage to four theaters and a dozen hotels, but was far less disastrous than the EF-5 that struck nearby Joplin in May 2011.
That said, though, Branson is well-positioned for the future. While it serves an older demographic, that age cohort is about to become the biggest in the U.S., and one with both high expectations for their entertainment and the money to pay for it. This group of millions of baby boomers has been largely responsible for the AV overhauls of the entire U.S. sports infrastructure, with luxury clubs featuring 5.1 surround audio in major-league stadiums across the country, and the proliferation of performing arts centers fitted with line array sound systems, not to mention churches with better sound systems than many music clubs. Once Branson gets on their larger radars, it’s likely the town’s own entertainment technology infrastructure will have to keep pace with such expectations.
Some of that future may already have happened. R&B artist Nelly did a show in town last year. What was supposed to be an outdoor event had to be moved to the Mansion Theatre for code reasons, but Wilhite says it went well and suggests that Branson’s horizons can be considerably widened.
Pete Savel runs the Branson outpost of A-1 Audio, now owned once again by founder and Parnelli Award winner Al Siniscal. Besides the fact that a major audio touring and rental company sees fit to keep an office here, Savel perhaps best embodies Branson’s latent potential. A native New Yorker with the accent to prove it, he sees the town’s possibilities as an even larger entertainment center through the haze of the recent downturn, as does the rotating troupe of Beijing acrobats that have become one of the town’s staple resident performers. Savel came here on tour with Andy Williams and supervised the singer’s touring rig as it was installed into his new theater nearly 20 years ago.
“I’m not sure what’s going to happen,” Savel says. “It’s not as busy as it was in the heyday, when Andy and Bobby Vinton and Wayne Newton and Mel Tillis were all here doing two shows a day, six days a week. But the production gear that’s installed in this town is pretty amazing, and there are other companies — restaurants, retailers, amusement parks — still coming here and building. They don’t invest without doing their research. They must know something’s up.”
