That's pretty much the story of children's theater, whether it be a stand-alone group or a school production. You are going to have a difficult time enticing adults to watch children put on a show... you'd be better off trying to attract parents of children looking for entertainment for the youngsters... to do that, you may want to look at your showtimes. I don't know what you're doing now, but try matinees and early everning shows with promotion through outlets targeted at young parents.

Thanks for the reply. We are currently doing Starmites with one matinee and one evening performance. I think you're right about the times, perhaps better to do two matinees. Many thanks! Mary Ann

I am the executive director for a rural community children's theatre formed in July 02. Thanks to the sucess of our last production, we have a cast of around 70 children performing in our newest production (which is the largest cast we have ever worked with). Typically our cast are 30 children but during our the last production we decided to take some creative risk to raise the attendence (we had the same problem...only parents and grandparent's were coming to see the shows). We found a couple of local business sponsors who were willing to help finance our "production" and in turn we offered to put their names on everything from T-shirts to flyers...we ended up raising enough money to finance not only our production but to pay for the marketing ideas that we had. We printed enough flyers, so that every child in every elementary and preschool in our area could take one home, we gave each cast member tickets and told them that the person that sold the most would get a prize (competition really motivates) we gave each school 5 comp tickets to give away as attendence or grade incentives, we asked the chamber president, the county judge, the sheriff and a local celeberity to make guest appearances in our production (and they all agreed),we put up color poster sized flyers in some of the area businesses and we talked the local talk show host into interviewing some of our children, we bought time on our local TV station (the sponsors paid for this) and we had radio spots that aired for two weeks leading up to our production and the local newspaper featured us in several A/E articles. We had decided early to only do two performances of the show because we were unsure of how ticket sales would go and we were renting the venue and didn't want the extra rental cost...anyway, very long story short....we performed in a 700 seat venue and both nights we had over 90% of the seats filled... This had never happened before!

If we could do this with a production that no one had every heard of(a local writer wrote our play)...I am sure that you can do the same!!

It takes a while to build a following but once the word gets out that there is a children's theatre program in the area...you'll be amazed at how many children and parents will want to become involved...

Good Luck !

Carol -

 

 

 

 I am sorry ! I should have clarified...the talk show is a local radio show that spotlights community interest (politics etc) (we also have a call in show where you can sell used items and they will sometimes talk about upcoming events between calls)...The time that we purchased on our local cable providers network...was to air our announcements (it's kinda like a community bulletin board on TV). Charter Media (TV) also agreed to air the production two weeks after our performance so that the community could see what we do..(we actually have some pretty talented kids and thought that it would be good to do this..it's not Broadway...but it's pretty entertaining) Another thing that we have done recently is that we have expanded our program into the surrounding counties...these counties are even smaller than our own and we have children whose parents drive 30 to 45 minutes to bring their children to our auditions/rehearsals...These children then go back and pass out flyers and sell tickets in their communities. We also developed a strong relationship with our community school systems ...(as we fall short in our arts and humanities testing scores) they have been very supportive and allow us to send flyers home with the children as well as come into their schools and talk with the children about drama...I guess the secret to our "sucess" is that we are no longer a secret...we have made our community believe in the value of our program...and they have been very supportive..