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The "new" Royal Opera House, Covent Garden


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Wasn't the last load of surveys used to identify their core audience as undesirable? This one seems to profile responses quite thoroughly by age and ethnicity. 

 

I'm wondering whether I should become a 25 year old Tahitian, just to keep the statistical gods happy.

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Firstly,  as for surveys, virtually every organisation now seems  wants your feedback and experience at ever possible opportunity.  It is becoming quite ridiculous, and  tends to make me highly sceptical of any reported news that is based on some survey or other.  I now tend to ignore all such requests.

 

I don’t really mind checking social media for RB information, and getting access thereby to a different slant on things,  including  the various related links, pictures, videos and personal views expressed. I am no great expert, user or advocate of  social media otherwise, but the ROH Twitter and  Facebook accounts do seem to attract a reasonable following and seem relatively harmless and informative. I also like the ROH YouTube channel.

 

However, not personally being an opera buff,  I would prefer the RB to have its own, separate, social media presence. I also agree that it would be preferable to keep the ROH’s own website updated for “breaking” news,  as well as using  their social media.

 

Otherwise  (as previously stated!) from my personal experience  I find myself in the main an unapologetic  fan of the ROH as a place,  and of its staff, and its website. I can’t think of any other equivalent venue that is so user-friendly  in terms  of information on productions, casting and ease of booking. I am not immune from joining in with the occasional  moan about these things  from time to time, but then I tend remember  how much I really have to be grateful to the ROH for, since rediscovering the place over the last year or so, and comparing it with other equivalent organisations, and their websites, which I find so inferior.

 

And no, I am not Alex Beard incognito!

 

A couple of recent examples of good customer service:

 

I mistakenly ordered two tickets online that I thought were returns for that same evening, but they  were for a later  date, for a different  cast. Realising  my mistake  after the payment had been made, I rang the ROH to ask what could be done. The assistant was extremely helpful, not only  cancelling the booking  immediately, but finding alternative last minute tickets for us for that same evening.

 

There was a temporary glitch the other day which meant the website was not recognising me as a Friend. I sent an email to point this out, and in under  an hour  an assistant had rung me to apologise, to explain exactly what had happened, and to  confirm that she had re-set my account to correct the fault.   

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20 minutes ago, Lizbie1 said:

There’s a job advert up for a developer which says that the website gets 450,000 monthly visitors to the website - I wonder how that stacks up against social media “reach”.

 

Interesting but, whatever the social media figures, that 450,000 is likely to include a higher proportion of people seeking info. with a view to buying tickets............... isn't it?

 

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17 hours ago, capybara said:

 

Interesting but, whatever the social media figures, that 450,000 is likely to include a higher proportion of people seeking info. with a view to buying tickets............... isn't it?

 

 

I would have thought it obvious that anyone visiting the website is actively in pursuit of information regarding performances and other events at the ROH, which is not the case with social media. Many people that my family and I know have the ROH social media boxes ticked but never bother to check the content. Friends of my age check their social media accounts occasionally at best. Many younger family members and their friends have moved on from Facebook and Instagram and those that haven't use them either to promote their own ventures or to interact with their friends, not to obtain information about the ROH, for which they would revert to the currently underpowered website.

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In the last few days my browser link to the Events section has reverted to the old style page, is that the same for everyone else? Has the new style with big pictures and the need for lots of scrolling been dumped? 

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No exactly the 'new' house but I received this message from a friend last night:

 

"Less than 30 minutes into Cosi Fan Tutti tonight there was a large bang.  The stage lights dimmed, the surtitles disappeared and the all the lights went out in the pit.  We waited patiently while they tried to fix the problem but in the end an early interval was called.  When we got back, lights had been carried into the pit and there was a little more light on stage but the front curtain remained stuck in a half draped position (part of the production).  

 

The performance would continue as a concert performance only and time would be saved by cutting the interval - and the recitative!  Heard from a member of staff that problem has them baffled and.............. they seemed worried for tomorrow's performance, ballet I think.  Good luck if you plan to go."

 

 

Things are not going well for the ROH at the moment, are they? Will this appear on their website as News - of course not.

 

 

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Things were sooooo much better before the ROH Open-Up: their website worked properly, casting was correctly updated (and names of dancers spelled correctly), the News section was updated, etc.etc.

Why has it all gone so wrong?

Who was/is in charge of all those changes??

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1 hour ago, capybara said:

and.............. they seemed worried for tomorrow's performance, ballet I think.  Good luck if you plan to go.

 

If it is cancelled and tickets are offered for other nights in exchange, at least it might help fill some empty seats!

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1 hour ago, Xandra Newman said:

Things were sooooo much better before the ROH Open-Up: their website worked properly, casting was correctly updated (and names of dancers spelled correctly), the News section was updated, etc.etc.

Why has it all gone so wrong?

Who was/is in charge of all those changes??

 

I think there are two things:

 

1. Upper management seems to have lost focus on what they are there for, namely the presentation of opera and ballet

 

2. The calculation was apparently made that bringing in new audiences - and I am all for this - must be at the expense of the existing audience (in effect that this is a “zero sum game”)

 

Add to these an obviously faltering website build and a lot is explained.

Edited by Lizbie1
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1 hour ago, capybara said:

No exactly the 'new' house but I received this message from a friend last night:

 

...

Things are not going well for the ROH at the moment, are they? Will this appear on their website as News - of course not.

 

To be fair, I've known a few such technical mishaps at the ROH over the years - the Gawain just after the current house opened, when the stage lift got stuck in the basement with (now Sir) John Tomlinson on it, and the performance had to be stopped while he was retrieved; the Macbeth where the moving golden cage failed and had to be removed; two separate Boheme incidents in the Copley production if memory serves, one involving a failed curtain and the other a failed floor mechanism; a Don Giovanni when somebody dropped a piece of the set during the interval scene change and damaged the stage... 

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Ah.  Gawain.  Why have they never revived it since?  I missed that revival because I refused to pay the extra-high prices (relative to previous runs as a "contemporary" opera) which they suddenly decided to charge.

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I seem to recall I didn't pay much for it at all, as it was back in the days when Friends could get Standbys!  I was a Young Friend or whatever they were called back then, and sat in the front stalls for about £12.50...

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18 minutes ago, alison said:

Ah.  Gawain.  Why have they never revived it since?  I missed that revival because I refused to pay the extra-high prices (relative to previous runs as a "contemporary" opera) which they suddenly decided to charge.

 

I think the revival was in 1994 after the 1991 premiere.  I don’t know why it hasn’t been revived since then as I thought it a tremendous production.  I hope you managed to catch a performance in the first run.

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2 minutes ago, JohnS said:

 

I think the revival was in 1994 after the 1991 premiere.  I don’t know why it hasn’t been revived since then as I thought it a tremendous production.  I hope you managed to catch a performance in the first run.

 

Isn’t one of the reasons that prime John Tomlinson is practically irreplaceable?

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5 minutes ago, JohnS said:

 

I think the revival was in 1994 after the 1991 premiere.  I don’t know why it hasn’t been revived since then as I thought it a tremendous production.  I hope you managed to catch a performance in the first run.

 

There may very well have been a revival in 1994, but there was also one in very early 2000 immediately after the house reopened, which is the one I attended.  I didn't start going to opera until 1996.

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JohnS - there were three series of performances of Gawain; the premiere was not a one-off. 

 

The ROH database was only partially completed.  So productions more than twenty years ago are only listed by the first night (unless they featured Placido Domingo or Monica Mason - because the archives once had a special exercise to post all performances by those two artists).  It all seems very haphazard, but the performance database has been completely abandoned for the last six or seven years.

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Many thanks Li tai po - that makes much more sense.  I knew there were problems with the database but thought the gaps were post 2004?  My understanding is that the Royal Opera House is still wanting to provide a comprehensive database and I’m very much hoping that it hasn’t abandoned the database.

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I went to the Alex Beard interview at the Ballet Association last night during which he addressed many of the issues noted on the 35 pages of this stream.  I'm not sure if I'm supposed to comment on a BA meeting, so I haven't, just suffice to say that he is aware of them.  

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No I'm not.  I'm simply saying that it is easy to be aware of something;  it's less easy to do something about it.   As far as I'm aware (and I used to belong to the BA), you have to wait for the official report of proceedings to know what happened in a meeting.

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On 07/03/2019 at 15:37, JennyTaylor said:

I went to the Alex Beard interview at the Ballet Association last night during which he addressed many of the issues noted on the 35 pages of this stream.  I'm not sure if I'm supposed to comment on a BA meeting, so I haven't, just suffice to say that he is aware of them.  

Is it a secret this Ballet Association?

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