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Seeking to build new audiences for its work, the San Francisco Opera, well aware of the challenges in bringing new audiences into traditional performance spaces, brought the mountain to Moses. In June 2008, they staged a free simulcast of Lucia di Lammermoor in the AT&T baseball park . The performance took place in the War Memorial Opera House, and using their website to draw audiences, the opera was relayed live to the stadium where 23,000 attended. This attendance has since been topped by this year’s simulcast of Tosca, which drew a crowd of 27,000.

Speaking of the first screening, the opera’s director of marketing Marcia Lazer told the Wallace Foundation;

“In our 2007-8 season, we analyzed our data base for the number of audience members 25-44 years old and found that 19 percent of our patrons were in that age range. One of our (…) goals over next few years is to increase that base by 15 percent.

“We scheduled a simulcast of Lucia di Lammermoor to AT&T Park in June 2008 and offered signups on the web, and that is probably the most important thing we did because it was the only way to get contact information. When we did a demographic overlay of the list, we found that 30 percent of our 9,000 signups were between 25 and 44. The best thing about the simulcasts is they invite in a much younger audience than we get in the opera house”.

Beyond the success of that single event, however, were the longer-term payoffs for the Opera in building a database of potential future ticket-buyers: 8,660 households signed up online for pre-event registration, 30 percent of whom were between 25 and 44, and more than 5,300 of the sign-ups were not previously on the Opera’s Tessitura database.

Those interested in attending next month’s free upcoming simulcast of Il Travatore can sign up here. This link also offers the visitor the opportunity to hear extracts from the opera and to read a plot summary, as well as offering the opportunity to buy a picnic basket for the night out. Focaccia anyone?