Week 4 – The Importance of Theater

June 27, 2017

Yet another preview and opening has come and gone! We are all becoming professional caterers. You honestly never know the skills you are gonna learn at a theater. Because there are so many different types of shows with so many different topics you’re going to pick up a million different skills. Right now I am sitting in on development meetings while also learning ticketing systems that will help me understand the business parts of theater as much as what it takes to run a show.

I’ve begun working more in Box Office selling tickets and answering phone calls. I was used to answering the phone working at the Cornell College Information Desk but I never had to sell things before. This year CRT has decided to have Front of House have more of a theater background so that they know what the shows are about and what goes into making them. This has been a great benefit for us all because we can face-to-face explain the importance of theater to people who might have never seen it and not understand why it should cost money. A lot of the time it’s hard when people say the tickets are too expensive or need to change the show they are seeing over and over again but we have to remember the reason we do theater. Unlike a number of other businesses theater exists solely for our audience to expose them to different ideas and world views and to ultimately teach them through entertainment. And we can’t do any of that unless we can get them in the door and that’s the importance of my job in Front of House.

CRT works hard to provide opportunities for the members to get to know each other. We all work very closely together and under lots of stress so it’s important to have time to de-stress. We end up becoming friends and getting together even in our time off. We’ve gotten so close that there has been a band created named after a game that was made up by members of the company years ago(“The 4-Pie Incident”). It’s fun to be part of such a hard-working close knit group of people. I’m excited to advance in my career and end up bumping into them. The theater world is very small and I plan to see many of these people again. I can’t wait!