Bay Area Theatre Week returns with half-off tickets
If you’ve ever looked at theater ticket prices and concluded that a whole art form was out of reach, Bay Area Theatre Week hears you.
TodayTix and Theatre Bay Area’s annual promotion returns Tuesday, April 30, offering a slew of regional theater deals — including many that cost less than cineplex admission.
At touring Broadway company BroadwaySF, single tickets regularly top $250. But during Bay Area Theatre Week, consumers can get into “Funny Girl,” “Company” and “Girl From the North Country” for $40 to $60. At Berkeley Rep, “Galileo” and “The Best of the Second City” are $40 to $60. And at San Francisco Playhouse, “The Glass Menagerie,” “Evita” and “The Play That Goes Wrong” are all $20 or less.
The campaign, which runs through May 19, comes at a difficult time for Bay Area theaters. Cutting Ball Theater and Aurora Theatre Company are in the midst of emergency fundraising campaigns, and many other leaders say they’re still struggling to attract audiences off couch cushions since the pandemic eased and auditoriums began welcoming fans indoors.
“We still have a gap between our expenses and our revenues,” said American Conservatory Theater Executive Director Jennifer Bielstein, citing a reduced subscriber base. Her the
ater is offering $40 tickets to “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord” and $60 fare to “A Strange Loop” and “The Lehman Trilogy” — a discount of 50% or more off the top sticker price.
For Bielstein, individual companies aren’t competing with one another; promoting theatergoing generally, as Bay Area Theatre Week does, benefits everyone. “People start going to another theater; maybe one day they’ll come to ACT. If they come to ACT, hopefully they will try some other theaters as well,” she said.
While last year’s Bay Area Theatre Week sold 2,000 tickets each to ACT’s “The Wizard of Oz” and “Hippest Trip — The Soul Train Musical” alone, the effort sold a total of 17,000 tickets across all participating companies, with 75% of the customers local and 20% going on to make further arts purchases via TodayTix, according to TodayTix General Manager Tracy Geltman.
“TodayTix continues to believe that the Bay is one of the most vibrant theater entities in the country,” Geltman said. The promotion, she added, is about “making sure that people understand that there is a wide variety of performing arts organizations, not just the touring companies.”
To browse Bay Area Theatre Week deals, visit www.todaytix.com.