Houston Grand Opera is doing better than the Met
mainHGO has posted season-end figures. Ticket sales were 84 percent of capacity.
Donations came to $16.8 million an increase of $600,000 on 2014–15.
The books are balanced, the city’s happy.
The Met, by contrast, is playing below two-thirds full and needs to find $100 million by next month.
C’mon, that’s a horrible way to do a “side by side study”.
Any opporuntity available to this website to denigrate the Metropolitan Opera will be taken. A little research on ‘Operabase.com’ indicates that in the 2015-16 season the Houston Grand Opera gave 45 performances of 8 productions. 7 of those were in a 2,400 seat theater, as opposed to the Met’s 4,000. The 84% attendance over the season isn’t that great. One of those seven was the highly challenging Rogers and Hammerstein musical ‘Carousel’, the eighth was a chamber opera performed in a smaller venue. Comparable statistics for the Met have appeared frequently on this site – but the latter company gives seven performances a week for nearly every week of an approximately thirty week season. The Met’s vast scale of operation makes comparison with any other company in North America, and all but a few companies elsewhere, simply irrelevant.
Whatever the difference in scale, no one can deny that the Met is in very serious financial difficulty and that a way out of Peter Gelb’s self-imposed financial profligacy is nowhere on the horizon. The fact is a General Manager is paid to manage – plain and simple. The HGO GM seems to have done well. The Met GM has not. There is frankly no need to bring in any other comparisons.
Rodgers.