2018 Adelaide Festival ticket sales surge
Adelaide Festival
The 2018 Adelaide Festival is closing in on last year’s record box-office result, with ticket sales three days out from the official opening already 14.5 per cent ahead of the same time last year and a number of shows expected to sell out.
A total of 47,140 tickets have been sold so far, compared with 41,140 tickets at the same time in 2017, joint artistic directors Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy announced this morning.
Box office revenue across all Festival events (including umbrella events but not WOMADelaide) is $3,746,802, which is 15 per cent up on 2017.
Although the 2018 Adelaide Festival officially opens this weekend, it is also presenting tonight’s performance by singer Grace Jones in Elder Park.
“I’m so excited I’ve got butterflies,” Healy told InDaily this morning.
“The Twitter feed after Grace Jones’s concert in Melbourne was just electric, so it’s really thrilling to hear that she’s brought her A game to Australia and hopefully to Adelaide, too.
“It’s going to be great weather, a fantastic crowd and everyone’s really excited and really up for it.”
The Grace Jones concert and opening-weekend shows in Elder Park by The Lost and Found Orchestra (from the creators of STOMP) have helped drive early ticket sales for the 2018 Adelaide Festival.
“Both are really appealing to very large parts of the community,” Healy says.
“The Lost and Found Orchestra is a really family-friendly event and they are an extraordinary ensemble of musicians, but it’s not just music, it’s also a spectacle … they’re just magicians.
“They can create such as sense of wonder and excitement.”
The Lost and Found Orchestra. Photo: Steve McNicholas
Among the Festival shows which are expected to sell out are the operatic work Hamlet (adapted by Australian composer Brett Dean and directed by Neil Armfield), American jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant’s concert at the Festival Theatre, the Chamber Landscapes concerts at UKARIA Cultural Centre at Mount Barker Summit, the Helpmann Award-winning dance work Split by Lucy Guerin Inc, and Indigenous singer Archie Roach’s performance on the Riverbank Palais.
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“There’s a suite of shows, both large and small, that have really captured the public’s imagination that are driving our early results,” Healy says.
The 2018 Adelaide Festival will run over 17 days from March 2, comprising 48 shows and events across music, opera, dance, film and visual arts, alongside Adelaide Writers’ Week (this weekend) and WOMADelaide (next weekend).
Last year’s Festival, the first presented by Healy and Armfield, achieved total box office revenue of more than $4.08 million (excluding WOMADelaide) – the biggest since it began in 1960.
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