Brian Rudman: AK05 chief tastes ticket-buying brinkmanship

Aucklanders are so laid back that, if we're not careful, AK05, the Auckland Festival, will have been and gone before we get round to buying our tickets.

You've got to feel for festival director David Malacari. The Aussie's not used to our spur-of-the-moment theatre-going habits. He spent years working with the Adelaide Festival, where well- disciplined "friends" of the festival bought their tickets early and often.

Sales for AK05, he concedes, "are slower than we would like". He says he'd been warned of Aucklanders' last-minute ticket-buying habits and finds it "very different from anywhere else I've ever been".

Forewarned is one thing but it still leaves him sweating. "You can't take remedial action because you don't know if things are going wrong until after it's over." By when it's too late.

One featured show, famous actor-director Steven Berkoff's acclaimed Shakespeare's Villains, was sold out two weeks before it opened its season last Saturday at the Perth Festival. It opens here in 10 days and there are tickets aplenty. It's a similar story for Three Furies, a musical play about the life of artist Francis Bacon, which was a sell-out at the Sydney Festival.

Offering soothing reassurance for his festival counterpart is Aotea Centre chief executive Greg Innes, who says it's just another typical post-summer holidays Auckland nail-biter.

He knows. In 1996, he took a punt and promoted a season of the Sydney Dance Company's show Berlin. Ticket sales didn't take off until three days before the first performance and then they started flowing out at a thousand a day. The Aotea Centre made a healthy profit, but it had been a white-knuckle time.

Mr Innes says the same thing's now happening with the festival. He mixes with people who are interested in the theatre and who talk about "the fantastic stuff" in the AK05 programme. "But when I ask have they bought their tickets, they say no, they haven't got round to it yet.

"It's terrible. It's not just the festival, it's everything. If there's not a perception of shortage, Aucklanders leave it to the last minute. If there's a perception of shortage, we buy it faster than anyone else in the world."

Mr Malacari, who took over the festival last September, plans to try to spread ticket sales for future festivals by adopting the Friends of the Festival approach. Friends get discounts for booking in advance, so by Christmas a healthy number of seats have already been sold.

He will also be pushing the idea that it's the festival itself that's the event, rather than the individual shows, and what a festival is about is trying out a whole lot of shows, not just staying in your comfort zone.

But that's for next time.

This week he'd just like us to get off our butts and buy some tickets. Not only so he can sleep more peacefully, but also because if we stick to our normal mob behaviour, we risk missing out on many treats.

"I've been told," he says, "that once they [shows like Berkoff's] open, Aucklanders go berserk and buy millions of tickets.

"But of course the first two or three performances will only be half full and that, to me, is a great missed opportunity for the empty seats. It affects our sales, sure, but it's also about what people aren't going to see as a result."

One show that is selling well, he says, is the concert performance, with the NZ Symphony Orchestra, of John Adam's controversial opera The Death of Klinghoffer, about the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship. "That's one that people had better get tickets for soon. There's no time for word of mouth. There's no second performance."

Klinghoffer is the adventurous stuff of festivals. So is something called Les 7 doigts de la main, which seems to involve seven performers packed into an old refrigerator. Can't wait.

Until now, we've had to traipse off to Wellington every second year, or trip across to Perth or Adelaide or Sydney, to enjoy the cultural overdosing a festival offers.

With AK05, the dream of overdosing at home comes a step closer. It opens this Friday. If you want it to survive, then do the unAuckland thing and buy tickets today. Then enjoy.