On October 15, Casey Soward (MET’09) became the new president and CEO of the Boch Center, home of Boston’s high-profile Wang and Shubert Theatres.

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He Used to Book School of Music Concerts. Now He Runs a Boston Institution

Casey Soward (MET’09) is the new president and CEO of the Boch Center

With an easy smile, big sideburns, and unruly hair, Casey Soward looks like he might be a cult-favorite singer-songwriter. But he is usually found behind a desk, not onstage. After nearly a decade as executive director of the Cabot Performing Arts Center in Beverly, Mass., Soward moved up to a bigger job this fall as the new president and CEO of the Boch Center, home of Boston’s venerable Wang and Shubert Theatres.

“I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and get to work,” says Soward (MET’09), who officially started his new job on October 15. 

Like the Cabot, the Boch Center is a nonprofit, but its storied Tremont Street venues are among the city’s highest profile gigs, booking Broadway tours, superstar performances, comedy, Latin artists, and dance (Hadestown, Ed Sheeran, Jerry Seinfeld, The Try Guys, Urban Nutcracker).

The Cabot seats 1,200, with a separate 120-seat club; it has an $8 million operating budget and about 24 full-time employees. The Wang has 3,500 seats and the Shubert 1,600; the Boch Center has a $40 million budget and about 45 employees, plus hundreds of ushers and stage and event workers hired for shows.

“While it is a big jump—and there are many more people to know and larger numbers to deal with and bigger theaters to manage—I’m very comfortable,” Soward says. “It’s the same skills, the same things that I’ve been doing over the last 10 years plus. You’re running historic theaters. You’re managing a board. You’re managing a staff. You’re programming, you’re marketing. You’re out in the community. And these are all very comfortable areas for me.”

Before working at the Cabot, Soward was director of production and performance at the BU College of Fine Arts School of Music, where he oversaw more than 300 concerts and other events each year, from on-campus venues like the Tsai Performance Center all the way to Carnegie Hall. During his time at BU, he earned a master’s in arts administration at Metropolitan College and was executive director of the New England Philharmonic, which plays at the Tsai.

It was a busy time, Soward says, but “it was a great opportunity for me to build on the skills that I was developing as an arts manager and an arts leader, and there’s nothing like diving headfirst into running your own arts organization. I loved every minute of it.

“I don’t look at this as something I have to do,” he adds. “This is something I get to do. Every day, I get to work in the arts, I get to work with great people. And at the end of the day, we’re changing people’s lives for the better with what we do.”

Right for the Job

Soward has big shoes to fill. Josiah Spaulding, Jr., led the Boch Center for 38 years before retiring at the end of May 2024. Discussions had begun in January, and there were plenty of people who wanted the job.

The search committee and Boch Center board were convinced that Soward was the right person for the job, says board chair Mark Weld.

“A lot of the other folks are wonderful, but they are executive directors of entertainment facilities, you know?” Weld says. “Casey is that, but with a stated purpose that’s a little bit different.

“We need to have shows that are name shows we can bring in and make some money. But we can also bring in some people where making money is not the primary objective,” he says. “Art is transformative, and he learned that well in Beverly, where he would make that kind of investment, with things like the filmmakers program, things that make a big impact in the community.”

The Boch Center’s strategic vision includes initiatives to expand its core audience, in part to deal with increased competition, but also to broaden its audience, both Weld and Soward say.

“The Boch Center has done a great job over the years with very diverse programming, but I think we want to take that a step further,” Soward says. “Boston has changed so much. It’s a majority-minority city. It’s a very, very diverse city. It’s a highly educated population. And at the same time, the number of venues in the city has increased dramatically. Even five years ago, many of the larger ones that exist now did not exist.”

It was his long tenure at the Cabot, a quirky, 104-year-old arts center a half-hour’s drive from Boston, that won him the job.

Built for vaudeville shows and silent films, the Cabot was for 37 years home to Le Grand David and His Own Spectacular Magic Company, a North Shore family favorite. By 2013, the theater was badly run-down and for sale. A nonprofit was organized to save the center and a year later Soward was hired to lead it. No magic involved, but he succeeded beyond what many expected, raising millions for a renovation and offering an eclectic slate of live entertainment events that recently included Donny Osmond, Herbie Hancock, and Elvis Costello, as well as children’s and educational programs.

In recent years, Soward has collaborated with the Boch Center on programming, including becoming “routing partners” for shows like an evening with Graham Nash. It sold out the Cabot in April and will soon return to the area at the Shubert.

During COVID, Soward often talked with leaders at the Boch and elsewhere about how to cope with the disruption.

“One thing we learned during COVID was that all of us venues, we’re all in the same boat,” he says. “At the Cabot, we had to lay off 85 percent of our workforce, which was a terrible thing.” It was only in the fiscal year ended June 30 that the Cabot finally returned close to prepandemic levels of attendance and revenue.

Both the Cabot and the Boch, Soward says, exist “to educate and inspire the community.”

The latest example of that at the Boch Center is the Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame in the Wang Theatre, launched in 2019 to educate visitors on the history of folk music and Boston’s important role in the genre through displays, memorabilia, artifacts, events, lectures, exhibits, and concerts.

“That’s really given us an opportunity to open the theater up to new people, to bring more people in,” Soward says. “Back in April we had our first induction ceremony, and Joan Baez came, and it was a tremendous success. There’s a lot of momentum with that initiative that we want to build on.”