Show news and a related grump
Oct. 1st, 2008 09:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bookzombieThe good news is that the first complete run through last night went pretty well, all things considered.
The bad news is that unfortunately we've had to cancel one of the performances (the Thursday) due to poor ticket sales. This is a perennial problem for us; although Andover is a pretty big town we struggle to fill the theatre these days. There doesn't seem to be any particular reason for it apart from amateur musical theatre seeming to be rather out of fashion these days. Someone at work did point out that the tickets are quite expensive but unfortunately these are set by theatre, not us.
My grump about this is around our individual ability to sell tickets. Whenever there are problems we always get the exhortation to 'get out there and sell more tickets'. The problems are 1) apart from my relatives the only people I know in Andover are members of the society anyway, 2) everyone in our families who can make it and are interested will come anyway, 3) while there are people at work who are interested, it is an hour or more travel for them to get there; you'd have to be pretty dedicated to make that effort, 4) most of my friends live even further afield, many of them not even in the same country!
My point is that you cannot sell over 1000 seats all together just from the friends and family of the membership.
End of rant.
Anyway, if anyone in the vicinity fancies a little trip to Andover to see me and pennski making an ass of ourselves in public, for money, then go to www.amos-info.com for ticket info (by the way, the matinee time is wrong - it starts at 3, not 2:30. Mutter)
The bad news is that unfortunately we've had to cancel one of the performances (the Thursday) due to poor ticket sales. This is a perennial problem for us; although Andover is a pretty big town we struggle to fill the theatre these days. There doesn't seem to be any particular reason for it apart from amateur musical theatre seeming to be rather out of fashion these days. Someone at work did point out that the tickets are quite expensive but unfortunately these are set by theatre, not us.
My grump about this is around our individual ability to sell tickets. Whenever there are problems we always get the exhortation to 'get out there and sell more tickets'. The problems are 1) apart from my relatives the only people I know in Andover are members of the society anyway, 2) everyone in our families who can make it and are interested will come anyway, 3) while there are people at work who are interested, it is an hour or more travel for them to get there; you'd have to be pretty dedicated to make that effort, 4) most of my friends live even further afield, many of them not even in the same country!
My point is that you cannot sell over 1000 seats all together just from the friends and family of the membership.
End of rant.
Anyway, if anyone in the vicinity fancies a little trip to Andover to see me and pennski making an ass of ourselves in public, for money, then go to www.amos-info.com for ticket info (by the way, the matinee time is wrong - it starts at 3, not 2:30. Mutter)
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tickets
Date: 2008-10-02 02:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-02 09:56 pm (UTC)I couldn't agree more about the difficulty of selling tickets unless you have hordes of friends in the neighbourhood. I once had the - well, not misfortune; experience - of trying to sell tickets for an amateur performance while I was unemployed, finishing writing up my MA thesis. Which meant that day-to-day, I tended to see and speak to nobody - and most of my friends were involved with the show.
Added to this, my brother and sister were also all in the show, which divided the number of available relatives by three. They kindly let me sell tickets to most of them, but this still added up to about five tickets in total. I flyered like a trooper in the hope that this would make up for it.
The amount of badgering that went on really made me wonder if my poor ticket sales were the reason why I didn't make the chorus of the next show. Or the next. I was working again by then, and could easily have sold a lot more tickets...
Ah well.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-05 07:04 pm (UTC)When there is a shortfall who covers the cost? Do the individual society members have to fork out at any stage?