El Dorado natives work to bring musicals to stage for Broadway in Wichita

They both grew up in El Dorado, albeit a few years apart from each other.

“What are the odds of that?” Chris Whitney says of Amy Hamm. “Her grandparents apparently lived around the corner from my parents.”

And now, Hamm and Whitney are working together to bring Broadway in Wichita musicals to the stage of Century II — Hamm as executive director of the American Theatre Guild and Whitney as general manager of the venue.

“We’re very much aligned as far as what we want to see, making sure we continue to bring the highest performing-arts content to the community,” Hamm said. “I think it’s going to be really strong, a big area of growth.”

And they’re both excited to finally make last week’s announcement that “Hamilton” will be coming to Century II for two weeks of performances in June 2023.

“I think this will really open the doors for newer audiences,” Whitney said.

LEADERSHIP, NOT TALENT

Hamm performed in show choir and on stage while a student at El Dorado High School — although in the latter she doesn’t recall having a speaking part.

“I was never really talented on stage but always loved leadership,” she recalled. “It was kind of funny that I ended up in this industry.”

After graduating from the University of Kansas in 2001 with degrees in business and communications and an internship with KU’s Lied Center, Hamm went to work for the Kansas City-based Theatre League, which programmed theaters, including Century II. Working in marketing, some of her first promotions were for the first engagements of “Wicked” and “The Lion King.”

When the leader of Theatre League decided to pull back, Hamm said, she took over the organization in August 2018, which morphed into the nonprofit American Theatre Guild, maintaining all of the former staff.

Initially, the move seemed like a win-win for Hamm.

“We had had an amazing first year and a half of my young company. It had been incredibly successful, we had undergone a ton of growth, we had added markets to our portfolio,” said Hamm, who currently manages the Broadway schedules for 15 theaters in 12 states.

“We were doing great and then COVID happened,” she continued. “We were shut down from March 12th of 2020 through Oct. 5 of 2021.”

No shows meant no ticket sales, which meant no income.

“The hardest part was just leading the team through that time,” Hamm said. “We had to have layoffs, we had to have furloughs, and we just tried to keep the team motivated, optimistic, energized during a time when all of us were doing work that none of us had experience doing. No one in our industry had an experience leading an arts organization through a pandemic.”

Hamm said she tried to be positive during the pandemic.

“The silver lining is we really learned a lot,” she said. “We built a really great team during the shutdown. We really focused on rebuilding and being better than we were before.”

During the downtime, Hamm rebuilt the education division of American Theatre Guild, and focused on its mission as a nonprofit.

“It may sound corny, but we truly make a difference and that’s what I think makes us unique,” she said. “It gives an opportunity to make a lot of meaningful change in the markets that we’re in. We’re already doing some great work reaching out to underserved communities . . . we wanted to make sure underserved communities weren’t left out.”

Hamm said she wasn’t quite ready to declare operations back to 100% pre-pandemic status, but that it was near.

“We’re working very close to a full comeback,” she said. “I think this spring we’re looking optimistic, we’re starting to see numbers pick up. I think patrons are more and more comfortable coming back to the theater.”

Wichita is “one of our fastest-growing markets,” Hamm said, and she was looking forward not only to big titles such as “Hamilton” and “Dear Evan Hansen,” but the fact that the run of a touring show is moving from three weeknights to four shows over a weekend.

“I think it’s going to be a really exciting time for Wichita and the Wichita Broadway series,” Hamm said.

BOTH SIDES OF BRAIN

A CPA with degrees in marketing and management from Kansas State and accounting from Wichita State, Whitney was “ready for a change.”

“I was looking for something different than public accounting,” she recalled.

She was one of the first employees hired at Intrust Bank Arena in 2009, promoted to director of finance in 2013, and found professional satisfaction.

“That could use all the skills, all the sides of the brain,” she said. “I just fell in love with the industry, the ability to create guest experiences and live entertainment and watching the crowds coming through the doors and just get swept up in live entertainment really, really became a passion of mine.”

After COVID, when “a lot of people retired from the industry,” a position as finance director at T-Mobile Center in Kansas City opened and she was hired in December 2020.

“It made me realize how much I missed the operations side of it, working closely with the actual tours and promoters and being more out in the event space rather than behind the scenes crunching numbers all day long,” she said.

ASM Global, which managed Intrust Bank Arena and T-Mobile Center among others, was taking over management of Century II at the beginning of 2022, and hired Whitney as the general manager.

“It was an opportunity to come back home, and I could not pass it up,” she said. “I’d missed Wichita terribly. There’s really something special about this town that you just don’t have in the Kansas City market where it’s so big. I went from somebody that lots of people knew to a nobody that nobody knew.”

Whitney said she is happy with the team she has at Century II, including hiring John Hale back as assistant manager and director of operations.

“Just to have his experience and knowledge has been so exciting,” she said. “He teaches me something every day. It’s a very exciting team we’re building here.”

Whitney arrived at Century II as the city has been in talks about the venue’s long-term future, including whether it should stay at its 53-year-old location and renovate, or move elsewhere.

“That’s the million-dollar question,” she said. “Certainly, everyone has an opinion and they’re not afraid to share it with me.”

Opinions, she said, have been “down the middle.”

Whitney said she is telling her team to keep things status quo.

“Until a decision is made somewhere down the road, whenever that may be, we are to run the building as it is and that’s the team’s goal,” she said. “We can’t control anything — we have nothing to say about whether it stays, whether it goes, or what the agenda is.”