‘Reverse Airlines’: When Larger Audiences Need Fewer Seats


SAN FRANCISCO – Wagner was the worst. Five hours—sometimes more—here squirming in 1932-era seats in the War Memorial Opera House, sunk into lumpy, dusty cushions, suffering from the bulge of springs and the squeezing of wide armrests, dying to catch a glimpse of the surrounding scene. The tall person’s head is one row ahead.

“Especially in a long opera – oh my god,” said Tapan Bhat, a technology executive and season ticket holder at the San Francisco Opera since 1996.

When the San Francisco Opera opens on Saturday, those punishing seats will be gone when it begins its scaled-down 99th season with Puccini’s “Tosca,” after being closed for more than a year. Opera has used mandatory leave to complete a long-planned $3.53 million project to replace all 3,128 seats with more comfortable, wider ones.

And San Francisco is not alone. Theaters, concert halls and gymnasiums across the country have been investing more and more in comfort in recent years, with larger and more comfortable seating to try to accommodate the growing audience, if not outnumbered. In the early 1960s, when the War Memorial Opera House was only a few decades old, the average weight of adult males in the United States was 168 pounds. federal data; now 199.8 pounds.

Since the pandemic began, theater and live venue owners have seen such investments more urgent than ever. As coronavirus restrictions are lifted, presenters are facing the challenge of withdrawing customers who have been without a cinema for more than a year and are accustomed to consuming home entertainment from the ample comfort of their own couches and recliners.

“The whole user experience has really been under a lot of scrutiny,” said Gary F. Martinez, partner at OTJ Architects, a Washington-based firm. “The venues are working diligently to enhance this experience. We’ve never spent so much time in the seats.”

The Chicago Lyric Opera took to wider seats in the summer of 2020. Music Hall in Cincinnati and Philadelphia Academy of Music. on Broadway, where old theaters are notorious for cramped spaces, NS Hudson Theater Wider seats were added during a recent refurbishment. The seats at the new Yankee Stadium are wider than before, and Daytona Racetrack and Oriole Park at Camden Yards Wider seats were added during recent renovations in Baltimore.

Even before it was shut down, viewers of all sizes were accustomed to ever-larger, sharper television screens and a wider array of streaming options than ever before. And when people went out, many saw what the potential could be in movie theaters with large, comfortable stadium-style seats set up, reclining and slots for drinks and sometimes trays for snacks. Why pay 20 times the cost of a movie—tickets at the San Francisco Opera cost as much as $398—to get stuck in the cramped air of the last century?

“I’m thinking about everything we can do to break down barriers and improve the experience we need to do,” said Matthew Shilvock, general manager of the San Francisco Opera. “If someone is having an uncomfortable evening at the opera, it shouldn’t be an experience.”

“Seats have historically been customers’ #1 concern for the building,” he said. “Letters to me. Letters to the box office. Letters to the city. And for some reason. Springs were coming from some seats.”

San Francisco has placed its new seats just in time for the reopening of opera and the San Francisco Ballet, which share the War Memorial stage.

The new ergonomically adjusted chairs are slightly higher, wider and more stable than the old ones. There’s 2.5 inches more legroom, and the chairs stagger to improve sight lines, giving even the shortest opera singers and ballet dancers a better view of what’s going on on stage. Seat widths are pretty much the same as before, ranging from 19 inches to 23 inches, but the new armrests are narrower, making the seats feel wider. And there are cup holders for those who want to bring a drink to their seat. (Ice is not allowed with all the distracting distractions).

Comfort comes at a price: That’s the loss of 114 seats and the revenue they bring.

The situation in Chicago wasn’t as dire as in San Francisco – the seats were replaced at least in 1993 – but they definitely needed to be replaced. The widths of the Lyric seats ranged from 18 to 22 inches before the remodel; they now range from 19 to 23 inches. The number of seats there has been reduced from 2,564 to 2,274.

“We’re doing the opposite of airlines,” said Michael Smallwood, technical director of Lyric Opera, referring to the practice of narrower seat-filling on airplanes. “Now you can sit at home and watch Netflix. People want to be comfortable. Operas like to be tall. People expect different things.”

“To put it bluntly, selling tickets these days takes a lot more effort,” Smallwood said. “You want it to be comfortable so they will be here again.”

Most of the seating at David Geffen Hall, home of the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center, will be slightly larger when it just opens. current renovation is is complete. While most of the seats in the old saloon were 20 inches or less wide, more than three-quarters of the new seats will be 21 inches or wider.

Backrests in San Francisco were once covered with cushioning. The back of each seat is now wood; removing this cushioning means more legroom for rear occupants. Danielle St., interim executive director of the San Francisco Ballet. “Without shoes, I’m 1.80 cm,” Germain-Gordon said. “And I have very long legs. They were the kind of seats where my knees came to my belly button when I sat down.”

The old seats at the War Memorial had become old relics, thick with faded cushioning and difficult to climb through, a particular concern for the opera crowd, which tends to wear out.

“It’s like the seats you see when you go to your grandma’s,” said Jennifer E. Norris, executive vice president of the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, which led the project. “You know, when your grandma has her favorite chair and it sits a little too low and a little too worn out.”

With cushionless backrests, the sound in the hall should be clearer. “The applause will not die in the room, so you will have great enthusiasm around you,” Norris said. “It’s also possible that the lady with the candy wrapper might piss us off even more. I hope the peer pressure will remind her to open her candy before the show starts.”

The renovation began in 2013 with the replacement of box-level seats and includes 12 bariatric seats that will be 28 inches wide, designed to carry weights of up to 300 pounds, as well as 38 spaces for wheelchairs, with an increase of six seats. before renovation. The project was funded with a ticket price ranging from $1 to $3.

The new seats were designed by Ducharme Seating of Montreal, which has installed seats in the renovated David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, as well as in theaters in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Toronto. The historic nature of the Beaux-Arts building near San Francisco City Hall – opened in 1932 – and the demanding demands of the high-end opera house and ballet made this project particularly complex.

“This is the most comprehensive design we’ve ever done in a seat,” said Eric Rocheleau, president of Ducharme Seating. “Opera houses are always the strictest clients.”

Germain-Gordon said that as the world slowly returns to normal after the pandemic, theaters have no choice but to invest that kind of money. “People can have a nice media room in their home,” he said. “In the old days, if you wanted to see something, you had to see it. No one had a movie-screen TV or a La-Z-Boys. But people invest in their comfort and they want to see it when they go out.”

Technology manager Bhat said everything would be better than the seats he took for long nights at the opera for 25 years.

“They were squeaky,” he said. “The flooring would wear out. So if you’re sitting in less than comfortable seats at an opera, something that goes on for four and a half hours, or the first act of the 90-minute-long ‘Götterdämmerung’ – that’s torture.”



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