2020 Adelaide Festival on track to hit box office target
Adelaide Festival
The Adelaide Festival is already close to reaching its 2020 box office target, with a number of shows – including centrepiece play The Doctor – selling out ahead of the opening this weekend.
Artistic directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield said this morning the 2020 Festival – which marks the event’s 60th anniversary – was currently sitting at 91 per cent of its box office target, tracking at $88,551 ahead of the same time in 2019.
The 2019 Festival set a new record with the biggest box office takings in the event’s 59-year history.
A total of 62,384 tickets worth $4,342,089 have been sold so far this year, excluding umbrella events such as WOMADelaide.
British play The Doctor, an Adelaide exclusive directed by Robert Icke and starring stage and screen actress Juliet Stevenson, has sold out 13 performances at the Adelaide Festival Centre’s Dunstan Playhouse.
Other sold-out events include physical-theatre show High Performance Packing Tape; The Sound of History: Beethoven, Napoleon and Revolution, a one-off classical music performance at the Town Hall, and verbatim-theatre work Aleppo. A Portrait of Absence, in which actors will “perform” real stories from residents of the Syrian city of Aleppo.
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Also proving hot tickets are contemporary music shows in the Festival’s new “underground venue” known as The Workshop (in the Adelaide Festival Centre), Romeo Castellucci’s highly theatrical operatic take on Mozart’s Requiem, and the Fire Gardens light and sound installation in the Botanic Gardens.
Healy and Armfield heralded the countdown to the 2020 Adelaide Festival this morning at The Doll’s House, a giant three-storey replica of a doll’s house that has been taking shape in Rundle Mall over the past week and will open to the public on Friday.
Armfield said the site-specific installation, created by Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi, was a fantasy object that would enable people to access their inner child: “It’s a way to create delight and take you back to a moment of happiness.”
The 2020 Adelaide Festival will present a total of 74 theatre, music, dance, film, writing and visual arts events from February 28 to March 15.
The official opening event is a free 60th Birthday Concert featuring Tim Minchin this Saturday evening in Elder Park.
See more InDaily, CityMag and SALIFE Adelaide Festival stories here.
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