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    A Bargain at the Opera: Philadelphia Offers All Seats for as Low as $11

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    Seeking new audiences, Opera Philadelphia is putting in place a pay-what-you-can model, one of the first of its kind by a major opera company.In Philadelphia, a night at the opera may now be cheaper than going to the movies.Opera Philadelphia, a company with a reputation for innovation and ambition, announced on Tuesday that it was putting in place a pay-what-you-can model for the 2024-25 season, with all tickets for all performances starting at $11. The initiative, which the company calls Pick Your Price, is aimed at attracting new audiences.“People want to go to the opera, but it’s expensive,” said Anthony Roth Costanzo, the celebrated American countertenor who became the company’s general director and president in June. “Our goal is to bring opera to more people and bring more people to the opera.”It immediately proved popular. On Tuesday, the day the initiative was announced, Opera Philadelphia said it sold more than 2,200 tickets for the coming season, compared with about 20 the day before. The tickets were originally priced at $26 to $300.High ticket prices have long been a barrier to audiences, and especially to newcomers. In recent years a number of performing arts groups, including Lincoln Center, the Chicago Sinfonietta and Ars Nova, the Off Broadway incubator, have experimented with pay-what-you-can approaches. Other opera companies have experimented with discounts, including rush tickets and deals offered to young people. But Opera Philadelphia’s approach was one of the boldest yet.Its website explains that all tickets start at $11 but that people will be given the option of choosing to pay much more, including the standard price.Like many nonprofit performing arts organizations, Opera Philadelphia gets much more of its revenue from philanthropy than through ticket sales. Radically lowering the prices could encourage more donations, which will no longer risk being seen as subsidizing an expensive art form that is out of reach for many people. And Costanzo said that the new model would allow the company to concentrate more on staging interesting works, and less on worrying about ticket sales.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      DeSantis Vetoes All Arts Grants in Florida

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      Gov. Ron DeSantis gave no explanation for zeroing out the $32 million in grants that were approved by state lawmakers.For the past 10 days, Richard Russell has been rattled, poring over budgets and working the phones in an attempt to limit the consequences of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s veto pen.Mr. Russell, the general director of the Sarasota Opera on Florida’s Gulf Coast, had expected his nonprofit organization to receive a state grant of about $70,000 once Mr. DeSantis signed a budget that state lawmakers had approved in March.But in a move that stunned arts and culture organizations, Mr. DeSantis vetoed the entirety of their grant funding — about $32 million — on June 12, leaving them scrambling to figure out how to offset the shortfall.“It’s not going to close us,” Mr. Russell said. “But it is a gap that I am going to have to figure out how to make up, and if I don’t find alternate sources of funding, that could be someone’s job.”Leaders of arts organizations in Florida, many of whom have worked in the state for decades, cannot remember a governor ever eliminating all of their grant funding. Even in the lean years of the Great Recession, at least a nominal amount — say, 5 percent of the recommended total — was approved.Established arts organizations usually know better than to overly rely on nonrecurring state dollars subject to the discretion of politicians, said Michael Tomor, executive director of the Tampa Museum of Art. But to cut funding at a time when arts organizations are still struggling to recover from the coronavirus pandemic sends a concerning message “that taxpayer dollars should not be used in support of arts and culture,” he added.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Netflix’s New Film Strategy: More About the Audience, Less About Auteurs

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      Dan Lin, the streaming service’s new film chief, wants to produce a more varied slate of movies to better appeal to the array of interests among subscribers.Back in, say, 2019, if a filmmaker signed a deal with Netflix, it meant that he or she would be well paid and receive complete creative freedom. Theatrical release? Not so much. Still, the paycheck and the latitude — and the potential to reach the streaming service’s huge subscriber base — helped compensate for the lack of hoopla that comes when a traditional studio opens a film in multiplexes around the world.But those days are a thing of the past.Dan Lin arrived as Netflix’s new film chief on April 1, and he has already started making changes. He laid off around 15 people in the creative film executive group, including one vice president and two directors. (Netflix’s entire film department is around 150 people.) He reorganized his film department by genre rather than budget level and has indicated that Netflix is no longer only the home of expensive action flicks featuring big movie stars, like “The Gray Man” with Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans or “Red Notice” with Ryan Reynolds, Gal Gadot and Dwayne Johnson.Rather, Mr. Lin’s mandate is to improve the quality of the movies and produce a wider spectrum of films — at different budget levels — the better to appeal to the varied interests of Netflix’s 260 million subscribers. He will also be changing the formulas for how talent is paid, meaning no more enormous upfront deals.In other words, Netflix’s age of austerity is well underway. The company declined to comment for this article.“Maestro,” starring and directed by Bradley Cooper, right, was produced by Netflix and cost around $80 million to make. It was nominated for seven Oscars, but did not win any.NetflixNow that Netflix has emerged as the dominant streaming platform, it no longer has to pay top dollar to lure auteur filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Alfonso Cuarón and Bradley Cooper. It also helps that some of the big studios are again allowing their films to be shown on Netflix not long after they appear in theaters, providing more content to attract subscribers. The latest list of the 10 most-watched English-language films on the service featured six produced outside Netflix.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Off Broadway, a Vital Part of New York Theater, Feels the Squeeze

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      The small theaters that help make the city a theater capital are cutting back as they struggle to recover from the pandemic.New York’s nonprofit Signature Theater has three modern performance spaces designed by the starchitect Frank Gehry, a long history of cultivating and championing major playwrights like Edward Albee and Lynn Nottage, and a board chaired by the Hollywood star Edward Norton.What Signature doesn’t have this fall are plays. The company, a mainstay of the Off Broadway scene, closed its most recent production in July and is not set to start its next show until the end of January.Even as Broadway claws its way back from the coronavirus pandemic, New York’s sprawling network of smaller theaters, many of them noncommercial in both tax status and taste, is struggling.“This is the hardest season yet,” said Casey York, the president of the Off-Broadway League, citing the combined effects of smaller audiences, shifting philanthropic patterns, rising wages and costs, and labor shortages at a time when the emergency government assistance that helped many theaters stay afloat through the lengthy pandemic shutdown has largely run out. “There is an incredible squeeze.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      As Broadway Struggles, Governor Hochul Proposes Expanded Tax Credit

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      With Omicron complicating Broadway’s return, Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed more assistance for commercial theater, which her budget director called “critical for the economy.”As Broadway continues to reel from the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic, Gov. Kathy Hochul is proposing to expand and extend a pandemic tax credit intended to help the commercial theater industry rebound.Ms. Hochul on Tuesday proposed budgeting $200 million for the New York City Musical and Theatrical Production Tax Credit, which provides up to $3 million per show to help defray production costs.“They were starting to recover before Omicron, and then, as you have all seen, a lot of these performance venues had to shut down again, and those venues are critical for the economy,” the state budget director, Robert Mujica, told reporters.The tax credit program, which began last year under Gov. Andrew Cuomo, was initially capped at $100 million. Early indications are that interest is high: Nearly three dozen productions have told the state they expect to apply, said Matthew Gorton, a spokesman for Empire State Development, the state’s economic development agency.The Hochul administration decided to seek to expand the tax credit program — and to extend the initial application deadline, from Dec. 31, 2022 to June 30, 2023 — as it became clear that Broadway’s recovery from its lengthy pandemic shutdown would be bumpier than expected.Shows began resuming performances last summer, and many were drawing good audiences — Ms. Hochul visited “Chicago” and “Six” in October, while Mr. Gorton saw “The Lehman Trilogy” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”But the industry is now struggling after a spike in coronavirus cases prompted multiple cancellations over the ordinarily lucrative holiday season, and then attendance plunged. Last week, 66 percent of Broadway seats were occupied, according to the Broadway League; that’s up from 62 percent the previous week, but down from 95 percent during the comparable week before the pandemic.“Clearly, we’re not out of the woods yet,” said Jeff Daniel, who is the chairman of the Broadway League’s Government Relations Committee, as well as co-chief executive of Broadway Across America, which presents touring shows in regional markets. Mr. Daniel, still recovering from his own recent bout of Covid, welcomed the governor’s proposal, and said the League would work to urge the Legislature to approve it.“Every show we can open drives jobs and economic impact,” said Mr. Daniel, who noted the close economic relationship between Broadway and other businesses, including hotels and restaurants. “If we can maximize Broadway, we maximize tourism.”Under the program, shows can receive tax credits to cover up to 25 percent of many production expenditures, including labor. As a condition of the credit, shows must have a state-approved diversity and arts job training program, and take steps to make their productions accessible to low-income New Yorkers. More

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      New York City Cultural Groups Awarded More Than $47 Million in Grants

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNew York City Cultural Groups Awarded More Than $47 Million in GrantsThe Department of Cultural Affairs announced Tuesday that more than 1,000 of the city’s cultural organizations would receive the funds.The Apollo Theater is among the organizations that will receive a grant of more than $100,000 in this round of funding by the Department of Cultural Affairs.Credit…David Dee Delgado/Getty ImagesDec. 15, 2020, 2:16 p.m. ETIn a year filled with layoffs and budget cuts, New York City’s cultural institutions got some good news on Tuesday: The Department of Cultural Affairs announced that it would award $47.1 million in its newest round of grants, which this year will go to more than 1,000 of the city’s nonprofit organizations.The grants include $12.6 million in new investments, nearly $10 million of which is designated for coronavirus pandemic relief and arts education initiatives. Funding will increase over the prior year for grantees, including larger increases for smaller organizations, the department said.The allotment includes a $3 million increase for 621 organizations in low-income neighborhoods and those most affected by the pandemic, and $2 million for five local arts councils that will distribute the funds to individual artists and smaller nonprofits. Twenty-five organizations providing arts education programming will receive a share of $750,000 allotted for that purpose.The Apollo Theater, Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Chinese in America will be among the 93 organizations to receive some of the largest grants, in excess of $100,000 each. Both the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic, which recently made headlines for negotiations with their unions, will receive grants over $100,000. The funding will go to 1,032 nonprofits in total.The department also made changes to its process that will make it easier for organizations to receive multiyear grants, which had previously only been available to groups with annual budgets of more than $250,000. Nearly all of the groups that received funding for the fiscal year ending in June 2021 will receive support at a comparable level for the year ending in 2022, pending the adoption of the city’s budget, the department said.A Covid-19 impact survey the department commissioned this spring found that smaller organizations were some of the hardest hit by the pandemic and that, at the beginning of May, 11 percent of arts organizations over all did not think they would survive the pandemic. Smaller organizations generally lack the endowments and wealthy donors that offer a safety net, to some degree, for larger institutions.“We can’t address the enormous challenges that lie ahead alone, but we’ve focused on providing long-term stability to the smaller organizations that are most vulnerable to the impacts of Covid-19,” Gonzalo Casals, the Cultural Affairs Commissioner, said in a statement.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More