Teatro Massimo, attendance boom in the first four months of the year: +21.6%. 35% of show audiences are young. Orlando and Giambrone: “Great satisfaction, theatres recover by relaunching”.
21.6 per cent increase in attendance, 28.5 per cent increase in takings, large presence of young people. The Teatro Massimo of Palermo closes the first four months of 2016 with excellent performances on tickets, subscriptions and guided tours with a considerable leap forward compared to the same period in 2015. With 16.7 per cent more curtain raisings (98 performances against 84 in the same period last year), paying spectators between January and April 2016 were over 48,000 against 40,800 in 2015. Particularly interesting is the figure for young people, who number an impressive 16,528, 34.43 per cent of the total number of spectators.
If we add to the spectators the more than 22,000 who took a guided tour of the theatre (in the first four months of last year there were 16,800), we arrive at more than 70,000 paying attendances at the theatre compared to 57,600 in the first four months of 2015 (21.6 per cent more). A further 4120 attended free admission events, making a total of almost 74,200 people who took part in events in the theatre in just four months. The increase is spread over both tickets (over 31,000, 16.2 per cent more) and subscriptions (almost 17,000, 20.5 per cent more). A boom in attendance that has important repercussions on takings. In the first four months of 2015, the theatre had collected just over 984 thousand euro, in the same period of 2016 it collected over 1 million 264 thousand euro, an increase of 28.5 per cent. Ticket takings grew by 25.30 per cent, subscription takings by 30.59 per cent, and guided tours by 32.46 per cent. In absolute terms, ticket takings amounted to over 553 thousand euro, subscriptions to almost 580 thousand euro, and visits to 131 thousand euro.
Great satisfaction on the part of Leoluca Orlando, mayor and president of the Fondazione Teatro Massimo, and the superintendent Francesco Giambrone. “An important result,” they say, “that is witnessed every day by the theatre full of spectators, tourists, and young people. This is the confirmation that to restore a theatre, managerial rigour and cost containment are not enough. It is necessary to focus on revitalisation, quality, and seeking new audiences’.