“There’s so much going on with the ‘must-see-this-because-you’re-teaching-a-lesson’ thing, and I’m fine with that, but part of me thinks we’re going a little overboard, and I need to have some fun,” says Melissa Ortuno, 61, of Queens. She describes herself as a frequent theater goer – she has already seen seventeen performances this year – but finds that she now prefers to buy tickets for individual performances rather than subscriptions. “I want to have a chance, but I don’t want to be dictated to. And that way I can buy what I want.”
But there are other reasons why subscribers have dropped out, including age. “We’re all old, that’s the problem,” says Happy Shipley, 77, of Erwinna, Pennsylvania, who decided to renew her subscription at the Bucks County Playhouse but sees others make a different choice. “Many of them don’t stay up late anymore; they worry about parking, walking, crime, public transportation, increased need for toilets, you name it.
Arts administrators say many people who were formerly frequent theatergoers remain fans of the art form but are now turning to it less often, a phenomenon confirmed in interviews with supersubscribers — culture buffs who had multiple subscriptions — who say they are scaling back.
Lisa-Karyn Davidoff, 63, of Manhattan, had subscriptions to ten theaters before the pandemic; now she’s much pickier, citing a combination of health concerns and reassessed priorities. “If there’s a great cast or something I can’t afford to miss,” she said, “I’ll go.” Rena Tobey, a 64-year-old New Yorker, had at least 12 theater subscriptions before the pandemic, and now has none, citing a lingering concern about catching Covid in the crowd, a new appreciation for television and streaming, and the sense that theaters program shows for people other than them. “For years I pushed my limits, and I’ve now reached a point where I don’t want to do it anymore.”
And Jeanne Ryan Wolfson, a 67-year-old from Rockville, Maryland, who had four performing arts subscriptions before the pandemic, now finds she likes an à la carte approach to buying tickets; she kept two of her previous subscriptions, dropped two and added a new subscription. “I paid a lot of money for the subscriptions, and some of the productions within those packages were a bit underwhelming or maybe didn’t have the wow factor I was looking for,” she said. “I think what I want to do is pick and choose.”
