Getting ‘em through the door
// July 25th, 2007 // Blog, Kris's Soapbox
Originally posted on my CBC Winnipeg Fringe Blog:
Throngs of people were out seeing shows in Winnipeg this evening: for the first time, we had trouble finding a place to park. People have begun camping outside of venues in order to get tickets to hot productions (I saw a group of teens who spent hours picnicking outside the MTC Warehouse, playing card and board games as they waited for tickets to “Kafka and Son” to go on sale). People are desperate to see shows before the festival winds up this weekend, and they’re coping with the heat as best they can.
Crowds are large, and artists are out en masse trying to lure people into their theatres. Lots of enticements can help sell a ticket to a show. On the promotion side, some enterprising artists are walking around with fans and spray bottles, spritzing crowds as they hand out flyers. Chalk art is popping up everywhere too (Alex Eddington pointed out some of his art from last year’s show that is still faintly visible), but many productions are still relying on the “elevator pitch” — the 15-second verbal hook used to pique people’s interest — to draw in an audience.
Sometimes, plays are built so that they can be easily promoted with catchy elevator pitches. Any show about sex is a safe bet, for example, unless the subject matter veers into sexually transmitted disease territory. Relationship comedies are popular, too — especially if they veer into sexually transmitted disease territory. The use of clever titles is effective — twists on popular book or movie names, like “Live Free Or Die Trying To Get Into Maxim & Cosmo” — and it’s quite easy to sell tickets to any show whose title features the suffix “The Musical!”. Gimmicks also work well (“our show is an exploration of the tragedy of prairie roadkill as narrated by a pair of albino nudists on stilts who speak in syncopated rhyming couplets”).
But none of this matters now. You can do any show you want, with any title you want, employing any gimmick you want. The only thing that determines the size of your crowd is whether or not your venue is air-conditioned. Drop that little tidbit into your elevator pitch (hell, it doesn’t even have to be true) and the zombie-like hordes will claw their way into your theatre two shows before yours, stay for one show afterwards, and gush about how wonderfully cool it is. It’s brilliant, and I almost wish it could be 36 degrees every day, at every Fringe, forever.
That’s not likely to happen, though (and it’s not fair to the people passing out from heat exhaustion in Venue 15), so I’ve come up with another plan: next year, I intend to appear as a stilt-wearing nudist (are you still nude if you’re wearing stilts?) in “Air Conditioning: The Musical!” Order your tickets early.
