Last month, Atlanta play producer Kinnik Sky was handing out flyers outside the Fox Theatre promoting her new play “Peace Be Still” at the Ferst Center at Georgia Tech. Then she got some terrible news: sales of her show were frozen.
By Monday, five days before the scheduled performance, Ferst officially cancelled the show.
“I was devastated and heartbroken,” said Sky, who was a top 16 finalist on “American Idol” in 2006. “It was embarrassing and humiliating.”
This was not a show the Ferst Center itself was hosting. Rather, it was merely renting the 960-seat venue to Sky.
A Ferst spokesman declined to explain specifically why the venue decided to cancel her play. Instead, the venue released this statement: “When unfortunate circumstances lead to performance cancellations, we promptly refund all payments, including those made by ticket purchasers. While it is unfortunate that the recent performance could not take place in our venue, we are delighted that Ms. Sky and her team found an alternative space to host the event.”
Indeed, Sky scrambled and landed a smaller venue, the 196-seat Theatrical Outfit, to host her show on the same night, April 20, But she was handicapped because Ferst didn’t provide her any of the Ferst ticket buyers who got refunds in a timely fashion so she could inform them the show was still on. Even then, they had already been refunded their money so she said many buyers were confused by the situation.
“The fact I found another theater is nothing short of a miracle,” she said, because selling a few tickets was better than nothing.
But Sky said she lost a lot of money, including her deposit of $4,000 from the Ferst Center, which the venue did not refund. (Sky disputed the charge on her credit card and said she ended up getting to keep her money.)
“It was a financial disaster,” she said. “This was months and months of hard work. Months of my own money and effort and talent. I flew in actors every weekend to rehearse. This was a full-out production and set design.”
Sky wrote, produced and starred in “Peace Be Still,” a dramedy focused around a doctor with a successful career and close friends and family who is struggling to find herself a husband. The cast included Aaron Spears (“Being Mary Jane”), Stacii Jae Johnson (”The Thin Line Between Love and Hate”) and Darlene McCoy, a gospel artist and Praise 102.5 radio host.
Sales were a bit slow a couple of weeks before the event so Sky said she reached out to TodayTix to help her sell 300 mezzanine seats at a discount. But she said TodayTix didn’t post the sale in a timely fashion so she contacted Groupon.
Ferst only accepts TodayTix as a third-party ticket seller and, according to Sky’s contract, she would be fined $500 if she used any other ticket seller. She said she decided to take that risk with Groupon.
After Ferst found out from the Groupon contact Taylor Moreno, Sky said the venue chose to nix her show instead of simply fining her. “I’m still crying about this,” she said. In a termination letter Sky provided from the Ferst Center dated April 15, cited her Groupon contact as a “breach of contract” that allowed them to terminate the contract.
Sky had a moment in the public spotlight in 2006 when she finished in the top 16 on “American Idol” during season five, the year Taylor Hicks won. She has been an acting coach for Freeform TV show “Mixed-ish” and the 2022 Disney+ film “Cheaper by the Dozen” and a playwright the past 11 years. She has won seven NAACP theater awards.
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