Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Jaws no longer drop at the thought of paying $375 for a prime seat at the Metropolitan Opera. It's the $20 orchestra seats that have people gaping.
Last week, the opera house announced that it would sell 200 seats for every weeknight performance for $20 each. Tickets for these seats, which would otherwise sell for $100, go on sale two hours before curtain time. On Oct. 3, the day of the announcement, 160 tickets were sold in 20 minutes. The remaining 40 were sold by 7:10 p.m.
Next door at Lincoln Center, the New York City Opera is in its second season of "Opera-for-All," selling every seat in the house for $25 on eight evenings over the course of the season. Then there is City Center, where the third season of the Fall for Dance festival, with all tickets priced at $10, concluded Sunday. And the off-Broadway Signature Theater Company, which specializes in American playwrights, is selling every seat at $15 during the eight- week scheduled run of each show through the spring.
Perhaps not since the early 1970s, when Broadway introduced the TKTS booth, have the performing arts in New York seen such sweeping moves to draw audiences by offering inexpensive tickets. The discounts are an effort to compete for leisure time with an increasing array of multimedia offerings and, in an era when patrons of the theater, opera and classical music are aging, to reach a younger, more diverse population.
"We've watched audiences decline in a rather alarming way," said Paul Kellogg, the general and artistic director of City Opera. "We need to be active in getting people out of their houses and into a theater."
The Met's $20 ticket program is part of a larger effort by the new general manager, Peter Gelb, to throw wide the doors of the opera house. A free open dress rehearsal and brown-bag lunch last month was followed by a populist opening night with the gala performance of "Madama Butterfly" simulcast free on large screens on the Lincoln Center Plaza and in Times Square.
"The goal is to broaden our audience and to fill the house," Gelb said. "The average age was 65 when I arrived."
At all of these institutions, box office response has been overwhelming. The Signature's $15 tickets which normally sell for $55 sold out within the first 48 hours for August Wilson's "Two Trains Running," which begins performances Nov. 7. City Center's six- day dance festival sold out in three days last year, so the program was extended to 10 days this year. To be sure, discounted tickets are nothing new; for years, people have been streaming to the TKTS booths to buy cheap seats at Broadway shows. But when cultural organizations sold cheap tickets, they were usually for the less attractive seat locations.
Cultural institutions take a great interest in who is buying the seats. "We want this work to be viewed and seen by people who don't always have the opportunity to go to theater," said James Houghton, artistic director at the Signature Theater.
And, so far, that seems to be the case. Arlene Shuler, the president and chief executive of City Center, said she was thrilled to learn that among respondents was a young man who said he saw an ad for the festival on the subway and figured it would be a cheap date.
"I wanted to keep it less than the price of a movie," Shuler said. "For $10, people are more likely to say, 'I can come and take a chance.'"
(C) 2006 International Herald Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved
