‘Best seats’ at Kimmel Broadway series will cost you

The Kimmel Center is instituting a mandatory $1,000 donation for access to the best seats in its Broadway series. That’s $1,000 up front, before the cost of the tickets themselves.

The new policy goes into effect now for new subscribers and in the 2022-23 season for existing ones, and affects 444 Academy of Music seats on the parquet level and in boxed seating.

The Kimmel, closed since March 2020, announced its intention this week to reopen in the fall with a slate of 13 Broadway shows for the 2021-22 season. The announcement drew elation from fans grateful to see the arts coming back to life post-pandemic.

At least some of that enthusiasm, though, was dampened when subscribers received a Kimmel email saying that seats they held were in the “premium circle,” and, after this season, would require an annual charitable donation of at least $1,000.

» READ MORE: Kimmel Center plans to reopen this fall with ‘Hamilton,’ and major arts groups back on stage

“I don’t want to say they are extorting us, but that’s what it feels like,” says Blake Cohen, for whom the Broadway series at the Kimmel has been a tradition along with her mother, aunt, and cousin since 2005. “Almost the entire time we have been in these specific seats, which are not cheap to begin with. Why can’t we be grandfathered in because we’ve been supporting the Kimmel all this time?”

“I won’t be a subscriber for the following season, for sure,” said Broadway series patron Matt Beauchesne, who usually attends shows with his mother.

For others, the idea of reserving a section of the Kimmel house for those with the means to give $1,000 sent a wider message about who the arts are for.

“It’s horrifying,” said John Orr, executive director of Philadelphia’s Art-Reach. “In a city that’s been so focused on creating safe spaces for all Philadelphians in the arts from a DEI perspective, to put such a policy in place that creates exclusivity in such a segregating manner, so that the people with the most money get the best seats and that’s that, reinforces decades and decades of putting poor people in the balcony. It feels like a step back from an equity and inclusion standpoint.”

Single tickets for “platinum circle” seats, to the extent they are available, are not subject to the mandatory donation. Kimmel leaders say the new mandatory donation for access to “platinum circle” seats has been under consideration for some time and is being rolled out now in response to the pandemic and sudden disappearance of ticket revenue.

“The fact remains that we rely on earned revenue to an unhealthy degree for a nonprofit,” says Liz Saccardi, the Kimmel’s senior director of development, citing the fact that 93% of the center’s income for several years now has come from earned revenue like ticket sales and facilities rental. “The plan was always to move to a membership model that expands membership in this way.”

With a donation of at least $1,000, the “platinum circle” member may purchase between one and four subscriptions in the parquet section, rows AA-K, and in select boxes. This season, for new subscribers, the donation-for-best-seats program will be in place for Hamilton, Pretty Woman, Hadestown, and To Kill A Mockingbird at the Academy of Music; and for Oklahoma! and Dear Evan Hansen at the Forrest Theatre (where the Kimmel will identify a similar block of “best” seats).

Saccardi said that in its research, the Kimmel determined that at least 14 other performing arts centers nationally had programs requiring donations in exchange for access to certain seats. Lincoln Center Theater in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington have no such donation requirements for subscription seats, spokespersons for those groups said.

Even with placing 444 of its “best subscription seats in the house” — as the Kimmel puts it in a subscriber email — behind a $1,000 donation scrim, the Academy of Music still has 1,446 premium-level seats considered desirable, said Saccardi.

“We have internal discussions about equity all the time,” she said. The Kimmel worked to make sure that “anyone who wanted to keep a subscription with good seats could do so without becoming a platinum member.”

Additionally, in order to ensure access to its Broadway series, the Kimmel cites a ticket price range that starts at $20 and community-rush tickets of $30 (depending on availability). The center honors all ticket donation requests for charitable fund-raisers for schools and other nonprofits, a spokesperson said. For each run of a Broadway show, the Kimmel provides a total of 10 free tickets to Art-Reach for distribution to underserved audiences. And the Kimmel works with local schools to bring Broadway artists to children for master classes.

The Kimmel is projecting conservatively that the $1,000 donation policy in this coming season, in which it applies only to new subscribers, will bring in $128,000, and in the 2022-23 season will yield $500,000 in new philanthropy.

The center does not have a specific goal for increasing the current 7% of budget covered by donations.

“We don’t have a number, but certainly increasing philanthropic dollars without decreasing earned [revenue] is the goal,” said Saccardi. “We just want to start moving the needle.”