Campbell Vertesi

Metropolitan Opera Live Broadcast tickets are on sale.  Go find your closest theatre, and then book travel arrangements.  Wait, what??  Gelb, I think we are learning that you don’t pay great attention to the details of execution.  Like putting broadcast theatres anywhere near your target audience.

First, let me define the target market as I see it: young, student aged opera nuts and musicians, who live too far from Houston/Miami/Chicago/San Francisco/New York to see a top notch show there.  I say student-aged because the theater venue is a play to a more comfortable venue for this age group.  Also because the ticket price seems to aim at a smaller income.  As a convenient shorthand, we’ll look at the biggest music schools in the country.  We’ll also look at where I live, because of the large classical music audience in Cincinnati – and because I have to bitch.

Ask me where we have to go to see the Magic Flute.  Is it playing in Cincinnati, home to the most recorded Symphony in the country, a top-notch regional Opera House, and one of the top music conservatories (and associated audiences)?  Is it Dayton, home to another solid regional house with enough donor money (and associated audience) that they just rebuilt their theater from the ground up?

Nope.  We have to go to Beaver Creek, Ohio.  Beaver Creek, that teeming metropolis, where the occasional opera fan might get lost on his way somewhere significant.  “Oh, THAT Beaver Creek!” you say.

Indiana University – One of the largest music schools in the country, with umpteen gazillion opera singers, along with corresponding donors and audience: that audience will drive 80 miles to Louisville, KY (an hour and a half)

Florida State University – Every bit as big as IU, with more undergrads than you can shake a stick at.  Conveniently located in a city.  Nearest participating theater: 162 miles away (two and a half hour drive)

I would have listed more, but the Fathom Events web server seems to be having trouble.  Will somebody please buy them a web server?  The  toaster they’re using is struggling under the load of a thousand opera fans saying “you want me to drive WHERE?”

Gelb, sometimes I wonder if you were hired to sabotage great ideas so they would never be used again.  “go on Letterman?  No way! You remember what happened LAST TIME…”  These are great ideas, but it would be better not to do them at all than to do them so poorly and ruin the idea for future years.  I'm sure that opera NUTS will make those hour drives to see the first broadcast.  Maybe the second, too.  But if you think that this is how to build a regular theater audience, you need some better advice.