The situation in Chicago was not quite as dire as in San Francisco - its seats were at least renovated in 1993 - but they were decidedly in need of replacement. San Francisco put in its new seats just in time for the reopening of the opera and the San Francisco Ballet, which share the stage of the War Memorial.Ĭomfort comes at a cost: This will mean a loss of 114 seats, and the revenue they bring. We had springs coming through some of the seats.” “The seats have historically been patrons’ No. “If someone is having an uncomfortable evening at the opera that is an experience they should not be having.” “I think anything we can do to break down barriers and improve the experience we should be doing,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera. Why pay as much as 20 times the cost of a movie - tickets at the San Francisco Opera go for up to $398 a seat - to be scrunched up in a cramped holdover from the last century? And when people did go out, many had seen the what-could-be potential in movie theaters that had installed wide, comfortable stadium-style seats, which recline and have slots for drinks and, sometimes, trays for snacks. The seats in the new Yankee Stadium are wider than those in the old one, and venues including the Daytona Speedway and Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore added wider seats during recent renovations.Įven before the shutdown, audience members of all sizes were growing accustomed to ever-larger, ever-sharper television screens with an ever-broader array of streaming options. On Broadway, where older theaters have been notorious for cramped quarters, the Hudson Theater added wider seats during a recent renovation. The Lyric Opera of Chicago put in wider seats in the summer of 2020, following the example of the Music Hall in Cincinnati and the Academy of Music in Philadelphia.

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San francisco opera house