Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Luke Tatge. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Luke, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?

The Good Night Theatre Collective truly started as a group of artist friends looking for more opportunity to do musical theatre here in Sioux Falls. From the beginning, the mission included paying performers for their time and creating professional-level experiences for artists who aren’t able to make theatrical arts their full-time living. We started small, engaging with a generous local venue on monthly cabarets, looking to expand to full-length productions once we found our footing. We took a chance on some of our team members presenting original work, initially out of necessity (rights and royalties for popular and established musicals can be steep, and original work is, well… free). But the community response to seeing original musicals became such a hallmark of our organization, that it helped us foray our reach not only into more well-known titles, such as The Last Five Years, The Rocky Horror Show and The Fantasticks, but it also aided us in sizing up our venue post-pandemic, further building our capacity to add greater technical elements and larger ensemble casts to our pillar seasonal productions.

Luke, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Founded in 2016, the Good Night Theatre Collective (GNTC) strives to create entertaining, elevated live theatre — professional arts experiences for bright, local talent. Based in Sioux Falls, S.D., GNTC is a local theatre company that values creating space for and compensating dedicated, skilled (and often undersung) theatre artists in our community; fostering an environment that bolsters talent and generous positivity — not ego; building a network of artists rooted in kindness, gratitude, trust and camaraderie; practicing supportiveness of our surrounding arts community by promoting, supporting and showing up for other local companies and organizations; and striving to develop theatrical experiences of a professional quality for a community that deserves artistic excellence.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

As many live-entertainment businesses across the globe realized, the COVID-19 pandemic made “business as usual” an impossibility. We didn’t want to abandon our roster of artists (nor our patrons), though, during this period of quarantine and uncertainty. After sadly canceling the remainder of our 2019-20 season once lockdowns began to be put in effect nationwide, we set to work on a series of virtual shows, with our Very Virtual Cabaret hitting our website (filmed entirely from our performers’ respective homes and edited together in harmony) within two weeks of the shutdown. We engaged our creative juices and developed multiple sketch-comedy variety shows that could be filmed remotely or outdoors and, in fall 2020, were able to use our reach to help benefit other struggling arts organizations in the community. We produced a series of “garden parties” in collaboration with other orgs, in which we performed songs, monologues and scenes with other artists, assumed financial risk and gave the profit from ticket sales to the collaborating organization to support them through the remainder of the pandemic.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

One of the hallmarks of our organization that we’re very protective of is creating an ego-free environment where artists can create professionally. Many of our regular performers are full-time teachers, administrators, pastors, counselors, etc., so we want to create a space where they can tap into their talents for performance and artistry without it ever feeling like a chore or an exercise in patience. This dedication to a positive, uplifting environment (and our protectiveness of it from a leadership standpoint) has helped us build a strong reputation amongst theatre artists in the area.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.goodnighttheatre.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thegoodnighttheatrecollective
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thegoodnighttheatrecollective/