The AT&T Performing Arts Center and the Dallas Theater Center plan to merge in early 2027 to both save money and expand programming options in the tough financial climate for arts groups that have faced dwindling audience numbers since the pandemic, the organizations’ leaders announced Tuesday.
“The theater market is challenged. And has been for several years,” ATTPAC President and CEO Warren Tranquada said in an interview. “Development accelerated after the COVID-19 crisis, but this started long before that. Both institutions recognize that we need to do something to improve value for customers, create more flexibility and ensure we have the most competitive product for people to experience, and offset the loss of subscribers.”
“There is no question that funding theater production has become more difficult over time. This will be a more efficient way for us to focus investment on actors, productions and the quality of the shows.”
If approved by the boards, DTC would become ATTPAC’s producing division, eliminating redundancies in marketing, accounting and ticket sales. According to Chris Heinbaugh, ATTPAC’s chief advocacy officer, this would mean laying off 10% to 12% of the total workforce.
The administrative offices used by ATTPAC and DTC would also be combined, as it makes sense to have employees from the same departments side by side.
Tom Fox
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The Dallas Morning News
The Dallas Arts District, pictured on Saturday, March 21, 2020.
The Theater Center employs 39 full-time employees, half of them in administration, said Executive Director Kevin Moriarty in a wide-ranging interview about the merger with Tranquada on Zoom on Monday. ATTPAC now employs around 85 full-time employees.
The merger would cause Moriarty’s position to disappear. He would leave DTC after 19 years, the first 15 as artistic director, and the theater center would no longer be a resident entity of ATTPAC. Under recently hired artistic director Jaime Castañeda, who began his tenure in June, DTC would continue to produce its own seasons of shows.
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Sustainable but stressed
DTC lost $2.2 million in fiscal year 2025, according to ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer website, which tracks nonprofit tax returns. Over the last three years, the company took in about $600,000 less annually than it spent. Meanwhile, ATTPAC lost $1.5 million in fiscal 2025, had a net profit of $1.6 million in 2024, broke even in 2023 and had a net profit of $3.7 million in 2022, Heinbaugh said.
“The center is sustainable,” Tranquada said, “but operationally it is under pressure year after year and we are looking for ways to improve our sustainability.”
“By coming together, we can move from maintaining the status quo to a period of growth and opportunity that would be nearly impossible individually,” Moriarty said. “Together we can actually think about a bigger, more expansive future.”
With DTC, ATTPAC hopes to bundle subscriptions to a broader range of programming.
“Audiences have become more selective and the appeal of a traditional subscription has diminished, making theater much more demanding to produce,” Tranquada said. “It’s not just in Dallas. It’s happening all over the country. People like to make their decisions at the last minute. They don’t want to commit. They don’t want to have a curated season. That’s made the economics of putting together a produced season that much more difficult. And that goes for presentations, too.”
From a season of Broadway touring shows to the Elevator Project series of productions by local groups, the nonprofit Performing Arts Center is essentially a presenter on its own campus in the Dallas Arts District. Venues include the Winspear Opera House, the Wyly Theater and the outdoor Annette Strauss Square.
ATTPAC also provides performance space to its resident companies – Dallas Opera, Texas Ballet Theater, Dallas Black Dance Theater and Anita N. Martinez Ballet Folklorico – and co-hosts the TITAS/Dance Unbound season of national and international dance companies. These contractual relationships would not change as a result of the merger.
DTC performs its plays at the Wyly and the city’s Kalita Humphreys Theater, which it operates.
Smiley N. Pool
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The Dallas Morning News
Sunlight falls on the Kalita Humphreys Theater in Dallas on Tuesday, November 7, 2017.
What the merger means for the future
The merger would allow audiences to “navigate the original productions that Dallas Theater Center creates from the ground up in the same ecosystem, with nationally presented works that ATTPAC presents in all of its various venues,” Moriarty said. “This gives audiences the opportunity to find their way to what resonates most with them, rather than having to choose one lane and being locked into a silo.”
“This is a great benefit for the audience and I think it will also be an incentive for the artists creating the work. We can put the right piece in the right space, whether that means continuing to work in the Wyly and the Kalita or thinking in partnership rather than competition about the other exciting spaces throughout the center.”
Moriarty and ATTPAC leaders plan to create subscription series that could include, for example, package tickets to the Theater Center’s annual event A Christmas story Production featuring other family-oriented fare presented by the Performing Arts Center.
Louis DeLuca
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The Dallas Morning News
Dan Domenech (left) as “Frank-N-Furter” appears as Brad and Janet, played by Alex Organ and Morgan Mabry Mason, during an appearance on The Rocky Horror Show presented by the Dallas Theater Center at the Wyly Theater at the AT&T Performance Center, photographed on Tuesday, September 16, 2014.
“Right now we are limited in what we can fit into our Broadway season by what is on tour, by matching available dates and by the right size of the theater,” Tranquada said. “By adding DTC’s capabilities, we can fill gaps. So if we see a lack of touring family musicals, this would be a good year for DTC to produce a family musical that fits into a package. We end up with a more well-rounded offering.”
Moriarty compared this approach to what a streaming channel like Disney+ does with viewers who, for example, a star Wars film or series. “The algorithm will also encourage you to watch Marvel content, such as: avenger Film. Or when you watch a Pixar film, it invites you to watch a Disney animated film. They are all part of the Disney+ ecosystem.”
The merger would be a bold move that builds on other cost-saving collaborations that have become the industry standard. For example, Theater Center and Fort Worth’s Stage West co-produced three shows between 2024 and earlier this year. Each production had separate performances by both troupes. Other local companies, such as Second Thought Theater, which performs in Bryant Hall on the Kalita campus, have begun similar collaborations.
A historical change
The proposed merger marks a historic change for DTC, which has been an independent professional company since 1983. After its founding in 1959, the Theater Center served for several decades as a graduate program in acting at Baylor University and later at Trinity University. In 2017 it won the Regional Theater Tony Award. It would remain just one of two LORT (League of Resident Theaters) companies in Texas that pays the best for actors and other performers under union labor contracts off-Broadway and its associated national tours.
“The performing arts industry has undergone profound systemic changes across the country,” Tranquada said in a news release Tuesday morning. “Stagnation is not an option. Two great Dallas institutions are coming together to proactively shape our future and create a new artistic and business model that can set the stage for strength and sustainability in North Texas and beyond.”
Heinbaugh said the merger would not affect Second Thought’s ability to host shows at Bryant Hall or Uptown Players’ use of Kalita as its primary performance venue. Members of the DTC-based acting troupe, who do not have salaries, would also continue to be involved in the work of the theater center.
Tom Fox
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The Dallas Morning News
During Aurora 2013, a video projection titled “Blue Prints and Perspectives by 3_Search” will play on the exterior of the Dee and Charles Wyly Theater.
They believe the proposed merger will allow ATTPAC to expand its educational programs, Tranquada and Moriarty said. Moriarty mentioned that DTC hosts theater arts summer camps for children at Wyly. One of her favorite projects is ensuring that every local seventh grader in the Arts District can experience theater, which she believes is now achievable.
According to Heinbaugh and Tranquada, ATTPAC would launch a capital campaign targeting previous major donors to raise money for the merger’s transition costs, including severance payments for laid-off employees and funding for programming in the combined organization’s first years. They declined to disclose the amount they planned to raise.
The executive committees of the boards of directors of both organizations agreed to review the merger on Monday.
“You voted to authorize Warren and me to sign a non-binding letter of intent outlining the basic structure and rationale for the merger,” Moriarty said. “Now we are beginning the month-long phase of due diligence and integration planning. By January we will hopefully be ready for a thorough review by our full board of directors and the formal vote.”
CORRECTION3:24 p.m., July 28, 2026: An earlier version of this story misstated what the AT&T Performing Arts Center and Dallas Theater Center boards approved. They agreed to examine the merger. The story has also been updated to clarify financial information about ATTPAC.
This story was shared through Arts Access, an arts journalism collaboration supported by the The Dallas Morning News and MONKEY.
https://www.keranews.org/arts-culture/2026-07-28/two-major-dallas-performing-arts-groups-announce-merger
