Personally, I have paid $50+ for shows at the IU auditorium numerous times. Of course, the prices vary for students, and if you want to sit in the balcony.  

Yes, people pay for the traveling shows, but that is a somewhat different crowd than goes to local theater. There is some cross over, but the goal of the two professional companies, BPP and Cardinal, is to put on very high quality shows, which they do, so they attract a bigger audience base.  The other theaters in Bloomington struggle to produce shows and fill houses. 

 With maybe the exception of Youth Theater that did 2 tuition based youth musicals and they put on exceedingly professional shows and even sold out a 600 seat theater on the last show of Peter Pan.

The amount of what it costs to bring a touring show to the Auditorium, while interesting, is irrelevant to community theater prices.  I occasionally go see a show there.  We enjoy the shows but we think the local theaters offer excellent quality for a fraction of the price.

I should define what I meant by better production value - I am referring to having a set, props, costumes and audition only actors. I have spent the last 4 weeks working on the Indiana premiere of the new musical “13”, I was certainly not criticizing the theater or the show. Yesterday, we finished our run and I am very proud of what we accomplished with 30 teenagers and pre-teenagers of varying ages and degrees of experience in 4 weeks. We had 4 sold out performances to very appreciative audiences, and not all were parents and family either. However, they had no major set, only some chairs, and wall mural paintings and posters and they are a camp and take whoever pays tuition.  People were willing to pay $15 even after having paid tution (we used to give 2 complementary tickets), so that seems to be an accepted amount right now (we used to charge $5 when we first started 10 years ago and last year I believe it was $12). It is still cheaper than IU Theater, Cardinal and BPP Mainstage but more than we have been charging in our community theater so we are reconsidering our ticket prices for our future shows based on this.

Would I personally pay more for an opening night gala?  Probably not, but I guess it would depend on if there was a reason to draw me there.  I like the way BPP does it with the no extra cost talk back reception with the playwright – or the actors and director.  The reception is actually meant as a way to thank subscribers – they are the ones notified of the event and it is not a huge affair.  Bottles of wine, cheese, crackers, simple finger foods and desserts make up the menu.  We get much of our food donated from local restaurants in exchange for publicity.

In an effort to increasing our opening night attendance, our organization has gone to 2-for-the-price-of-1 tickets for opening night only. There are a number of reasons: 1)a bigger house early in the run increases word-0f-mouth sales for the rest of the run; 2)we only have one price (no senior, student, miltary, etc. rates) so it gives us a repsonse to complaints about prices; 3)it's a great marketing tool - a live show is cheaper than a movie. Our overall attendance has increased since we started doing this.