Who Does the Theater Belong To? What the Met’s 70,000 free tickets can teach us about Opera, Civic Partnership, and the Value of Local Arts

When I read that New York City and the Metropolitan Opera were partnering to make 70,000 tickets available free to New Yorkers, one number immediately caught my attention.

Not 70,000.

Ten percent.

Roughly ten percent of the Met’s available tickets for the 2026–27 season will become an investment in people who have not recently purchased a ticket to the Met. Seats throughout the house will become invitations to students, families, residents and people who may have spent their entire lives living in New York without ever believing that the Metropolitan Opera belonged to them.

There are plenty of practical reasons for the Met to do this. An empty seat generates no ticket revenue anyway. The company needs new audiences. Opera needs new audiences.

What I find inspiring about this is that city has looked at one of its cultural institutions and said, in effect: this matters to the civic life of our community, and we want more of our citizens to experience it.

That is the part I cannot stop thinking about.

The Value of an Empty Seat

What if an empty seat isn't simply a lost ticket sale?

What if it is an invitation?

It can introduce someone to opera. It can begin a relationship. It can turn a building someone has passed for twenty years into a place where they suddenly feel they belong.

And what if arts organizations began measuring the value of a ticket not only by the revenue it generates tonight, but by the relationship it might create over the next ten years?

Of course, giving away a ticket is not the same thing as developing an audience. Getting someone through the doors once is only the beginning. The harder work comes afterward: Was that person welcomed? Did they understand what they were seeing? Did they see themselves reflected somewhere in the experience? Did anyone invite them back?

But first, they have to walk through the door.

And sometimes civic institutions can help open it.

A City Can Own a Theater Without Cultivating an Arts Ecosystem

This question feels particularly personal to me because much of my artistic life happens inside publicly owned spaces.

The company I lead performs in a beautiful, historic, city-run theater. I want to be very clear here: I deeply appreciate the people who work inside that theater. We have staff members who support our productions, solve problems with us, welcome our artists and work extremely hard within the systems and resources available to them.

This isn't an indictment of the people working backstage, in the box office or in theater administration.It is a question about the larger civic structure surrounding them and about a cultural attitude toward local arts organizations that exists far beyond one theater or one city. There is an important distinction between a city owning a theater and a city cultivating an arts ecosystem.

Like many regional arts organizations, we raise our own production funds. We hire our own artists. We build our own audiences. We employ singers, musicians, designers, directors and technicians. We assume the substantial financial risk of producing live opera. And then we rent the building and the relationship can become strangely transactional.

When rental rates at our city theater increased, members of Loveland Opera Theatre and other members of the arts community went to City Council to speak about what those increases would mean for the organizations actually creating cultural programming in the community.

That matters because rental fees do not exist in isolation.

Neither do limited box-office hours. Neither does marketing support. Neither does access to municipal promotional infrastructure. Neither does the distinction between programming a city chooses to "present" and the work created by organizations that live, rehearse, hire, spend money and build audiences in that same community. Every additional barrier affects whether an organization can sell another ticket.

And every ticket matters.

More Than a Rental Partner

The phrase that increasingly troubles me is rental partner.

Not because I believe local organizations are entitled to unlimited public subsidy, free facilities or exemption from the financial realities of operating a historic theater. The theater has a bottom line, too. But words reveal relationships. When a local arts organization repeatedly produces substantial work on a city-owned stage, at what point does that organization become something more than a customer of the building?

Our company  has  hosted extraordinary artists on that city owned stage.

Performers with Broadway credits have appeared here. Singers who have performed at the Metropolitan Opera have appeared here. Alongside them are remarkable Colorado artists, professional singers, orchestral musicians, designers, dancers, directors and technicians creating sophisticated work in the communities where they actually live.

Yet there can be a peculiar assumption in the arts that prestige must arrive from somewhere else. A touring act arrives from another city and its very arrival can confer importance. A professional artist who lives twenty minutes away walks through the same stage door and somehow the work becomes "local." Those words should not be opposites.

Local does not mean amateur. Community does not mean lesser.

Nor does this mean cities should stop presenting touring entertainment. A civic theater should serve many tastes. Comedy, popular music, tribute acts, family entertainment, touring productions, classical music, theater, dance and opera can all belong on the same stage.

My question is why the artists and organizations already creating ambitious work in that community are so often treated as ancillary to that cultural identity rather than central to it.

What Partnership Could Actually Mean

New York City is obviously not Loveland, Colorado.

Loveland Opera Theatre is not the Metropolitan Opera.

Our budgets, audiences, buildings and communities exist on completely different scales.

But philosophy scales remarkably well.

The important number may not be 70,000.

The important word may be partnership.

What would happen if more civic leaders looked at the arts organizations in their communities and asked not simply:

How much does it cost you to rent our theater?

But:

What are you bringing to our community, and how can we help more people experience it?

That doesn't necessarily require writing enormous checks.

It could mean expanding box-office access so community organizations have more opportunities to sell tickets.It could mean including resident arts organizations in municipal marketing channels. It could mean cross-promoting performances happening inside city-owned cultural facilities.It could mean partnerships with schools, libraries, senior communities and universities.It could mean making unsold seats available to people who otherwise could not attend.It could mean examining rental structures and asking whether they unintentionally create barriers for the nonprofit organizations those facilities were ostensibly created to serve.It could mean recognizing local arts organizations as cultural partners rather than simply rental clients.Perhaps most importantly, it could mean civic leaders publicly saying:

The art being created here matters.

Who Does the Theater Belong To?

There is another side to this conversation, and those of us running arts organizations need to acknowledge it. Civic partnership cannot be something we demand while remaining disconnected from the communities we claim to serve. Opera companies have work to do and we’re no exception but I’m making it my personal mission to change that in the community I’m serving.

We have to branch out in our communities in a welcoming way. We have to develop audiences rather than simply sell tickets. We have to build relationships with schools and families and businesses. We have to examine our own barriers to entry. We have to create programming that is artistically meaningful while remembering that our survival ultimately depends upon people believing our work has a place in their lives.

That was part of what I argued when I wrote about the boutique opera model: perhaps the future of this art form lies partly in rebuilding the relationship between opera companies and the communities around them. Relationships require reciprocity. Arts organizations should ask how we can better serve our cities.Our cities should also ask how they can better cultivate the artists and organizations already serving them.

A city can own a theater without cultivating an arts ecosystem.It can maintain the building, book performances, rent the stage and balance the ledger. A  thriving cultural community requires something more, which is  recognizing that the people making art in a city are not simply customers of its cultural infrastructure.They are part of that infrastructure.

Perhaps that is the larger lesson hidden inside those 70,000 tickets.

An empty seat has value beyond its price.

A local artist has value beyond their rental contract.

And when civic leaders begin treating cultural organizations not merely as occupants of public spaces but as partners in the identity and vitality of their communities, the question changes.

It is no longer simply:

How do we fill the theater?

It becomes:

Who do we want to feel that this theater belongs to?