T Minus 30 Days: Still a Trickle, But Definitely Heading Up!

Every producer watches, watches, watches... did we sell any tickets today? Still four weeks out from our opening night, our ticket sales are just a trickle. We don't expect any big upturn until July 1, when our full ad campaign has kicked in and we have hopefully gotten some more word of mouth.

With that understanding, it is still cool to note that this week, our ticket sales made a definite turn upward this week. Sales have been trickling in since the end of March (even before Barb and I made our trek to New York to visit the Hair Archives) when we sold our first tickets. We have had generally consistent week-to-week sales of a few hundred dollars, but this week, things almost doubled. Here is the chart of weekly sales:

Week     Weekly Cumulative
31-Mar     $164   $  164
7-Apr       293      457
14-Apr      245      702
21-Apr      300    1,002
28-Apr      144    1,146
05-May      150    1,296
12-May      155    1,451
19-May      240    1,691
26-May      460    2,151
2-Jun       475    2,626
9-Jun       420    3,046
16-Jun      735    3,781

The early effects of our ad in the San Jose Rep's Nixon's Nixon program showed up through April 14, but after that, sales slumped a bit for a few weeks, then started going up again as word of mouth from the cast and distribution of flyers and posters started. The sudden uptick this week is a little unexpected. We didn't do anything this week to suggest that would happen, so it must be happening purely by the effects of cumulative word of mouth and distribution of materials. In the next few weeks, though, a series of ads will start to break:

1/2 page program ad for Los Gatos' Jazz on the Plaz (which runs all summer)
1/2 page program ad in American Musical Theater's All Shook Up
Full page program ad in San Jose Rep's Ella
1/4 page ad in Out Now Magazine
Smaller ads in The Metro and The Wave
A full page ad in Discover San Jose (July), along with an article and pictures!

This is going to be the widest ad campaign we've ever run. In addition, we will probably get a significant amount of non-paid publicity from our local papers, and maybe even a few papers farther afield (Bay Area Reporter is interested in doing an article on our show).

It will be interesting to see how sales track over the four weeks leading up to our opening. An interesting comparison is our week-to-week sales for Tomfoolery:

Week     Weekly Cumulative
9-Sep    $  140  $  140 
16-Sep*     347     487
23-Sep      482     969
30-Sep      647   1,616
7-Oct     2,401   4,017
14-Oct    2,473   6,490 
21-Oct    3,652  10,142
28-Oct    4,191  14,333
4-Nov       788  15,121

Opening Saturday for Tomfoolery was October 14, and opening Saturday for Hair is July 14, so the dates correlate very closely. In fact, the week marked September 16 (with the asterisk) is essentially the same week as June 16, the most current week in the Hair table. That means, at the same point as we were for Tomfoolery (4 weeks out), we have sold TEN TIMES as many dollars worth of tickets for HAIR. And we didn't hit $3750 dollars in total sales for Tomfoolery until very late in the week ending Oct. 7. So we are FAR ahead of where we were in our last production.

Pretty cool, for sure!

Of course, we have no way of knowing what will happen as we get closer to opening, and we also have no idea what will happen after we open. But the show is already demonstrating its power as a draw. Other companies have experienced the same thing. Sacramento's Artistic Differences company sold out almost there entire run by the second weekend of their show. Mountain Play has been selling over 3000 tickets a performance for its Sunday afternoon performances. We need about 1.5 times ONE PERFORMANCE of their ticket sales to sell out our entire run!

Stay tuned, the rocket ship is just starting to leave the launch pad!

Jon