Missed Opportunity

It occurred to me a couple of weeks back that the little Janacek festival we've had recently represented an opportunity for San Francisco Opera and West Edge Opera to piggyback on each other's successes. In the US, it's just not often that you can see Jenufa, Cunning Little Vixen, and Vec Makropulos in close geographical and temporal proximity.

Believe it or not, this would be most to the advantage of SFO: they simply have a lot more tickets to sell than WEO does. For comparison's sake, the Oakland train station seats about 500. The War Memorial Opera House approaches 3200. Selling 1500 tickets to three performances represents a huge success for WEO, but for SFO to sell out three performances, they've got to move nearly 10,000 tickets.

SFO may also assume that everyone who goes to WEO knows what's up across the bay and that no additional outreach is necessary. It wouldn't be hard to test; they would have just had to place an ad in the WEO program with a special discount code for Makropulos.

Too late now, but maybe another year.