A quick conversation with the Seattle Opera

Yesterday I wrote about the Seattle Opera's Confessions of a First-Time Opera Goer contest.

As a followup, Kristina Murti, Associate Director of Marketing at Seattle Opera was kind enough to answer a few more questions about the promotion.

Ticket: Where did you get the idea to search for a young, behind-the-scenes host?  

Murti: We are fortunate enough to have received a generous grant from the Wallace Foundation for the Arts to support creating virtual communities around the opera.  So this project is part of many we are doing for that grant.  All of the projects we are doing this summer around the Ring have to do with storytelling – either telling of the actual Ring stories themselves, or how we produce the Ring, or how someone experiences it here or elsewhere. So for this project we are focusing on telling the story of someone who is attending the Ring for the first time.  Since we also want to achieve the goal of creating an online community, we thought that using a young person would be the best fit for that.  

Introducing young people to opera is an ongoing part of our audience development goals.  We have successful programs for group sales in the high schools and colleges with ticket prices as low as $30 for seats in the orchestra.  We also have the largest young professionals group in the country with almost 700 members (of which 85% subscribe to Seattle Opera).

Ticket: Has the response met or exceeded your expectations?  

Murti: So far we have been thrilled.  We had a 3 week period where we accepted applications.  We had about 25 people send in their applications directly to us or post on our Facebook page.  We had another 25 people audition through a Live Casting call we did at a recent performance.  It was really hard to select down to 5 finalist and we have had over 5000 people vote to select the winner, which we are announcing on our blog tomorrow.  Of course the main part of the project is introducing our host to Seattle Opera’s Ring over the course of the summer, and culminating in that individual attending the Ring starting August 9.  So most of the project is yet to come.  We plan to release short videos over the summer and also the winner will be blogging.  In mid September, we will have a release party for the final 10 minute documentary.

Ticket: Will you consider continuing the program after "The Ring" has completed its run? 

Murti: We’ll have to see how this first one goes.  There was a lot of enthusiasm not only from the contestants but also from the voters, and our own audience.