“Imagine if, each time you bought a sandwich from a high-street coffee shop, someone leapt up and said ‘you’ll need a mortgage to pay for that!’ ” writes Andrew Mitchell in Tuesday’s (11/3) Guardian (London). “It’s obvious that lunch is available cheaply, even if there is also the option to pay far more…. Today, some of the top seats can now cost £100 or more, but the cheapest tickets to see opera across the country can still be as low as £10—or sometimes even only £5…. I [recently] wrote a post on my classical blog specifically focused on entry-prices, i.e., the cost of the cheapest tickets available, for a variety of current or upcoming live events in the UK. My comparison confirmed tickets are available for operas at cheaper prices than for any major cultural, sporting or tourist activity…. At the Royal Opera, 44% of tickets in the 2014-15 season cost £50 or less; 33% of the tickets for Welsh National Opera’s The Marriage of Figaro cost £25 or less; and 500 English National Opera tickets are available at £20 or less for every performance…. It’s well past time for the media to drop the cost cliché and talk about the real value … instead.”
Posted November 5, 2015
