Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Operas for $20? New Audiences Hear Siren Song
New York Times: "Last week, the opera house announced that it would sell 200 seats for every weeknight performance for just $20 each. Tickets for these seats, which would normally sell for $100, go on sale two hours before curtain time. On Tuesday, the day of the announcement, 160 tickets were sold in 20 minutes. The remaining 40 were sold out by 7:10 p.m."
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4 comments:
I could get behind $20 tickets. When you go to a show and have to pay the discount (because I am a student and will not be able to pay full price for a while) ticket price and have to sit behind the speaker stack, it ruins the magic a bit. The Opera for All idea is great. If people are comfortable with the situation and don’t feel singled out because they have the worst seats, then people are more willing to pay a little more next time. I think the next step to opening the experience of the performing arts is to have a casual dress night. If it is a struggle to pay full price for tickets, then it is also a struggle to get a dress to look appropriate at the opera.
-Julie Cross
this isnt a new idea, Broadway does the same thing, selling discount tickets an hour or so before the show opens.
so it had a good chance at working.
its good that opera has decided to do this, because i think in today's society among the younger generation opera is a dying bread. giving the people more opportunity to see it, is going to hopefully bring opera back up a bit.
now they just need some catchy advertising slogan.
Selling cheap tickets is definately, i think, one of the best ways to not only get people in the seats, but to get them to come back. As this article states, theatre enthusiasts, and paricularly opera and symphony enthusiasts are aging, creating a necessity for younger audiences. And the availabiltiy of cheaper tickets is definately a more sure fire way to revitalize audiences and attract the youth.
-Samantha Englender
$20 per ticket sounds like an amazing deal to me. I for one am actually an opera fan, but with such expensive tickets hardly ever get the chance to see shows anymore. Many people seem to shy away from the genre as if it were the plague. A little bit of exposure however can make a huge difference with ones opinion of the genre. Cheaper prices hopefully will bring said exposure and lead more of the public to try out the opera experience. $20 is basically a night going to the movies. It's not such a stretch that people may go to the opera instead.
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