# Teatro Real aborts opening evening amid overbooking scandal



## Granate (Jun 25, 2016)

*Teatro Real aborts second evening amid overbooking scandal*

Twitter thread with videos

















To sum it up.


Teatro Real in Madrid opens the Opera season with a cashcow like _Un Ballo in Maschera_.
Officially, the theatre is only occupied at 50% to comply with covid-19 regulations. The Culture crisis has been very hard in the country and several Music and Entertainment industries demonstrated last thursday to protest against the lack of measures in public transportation compared to venues related to film and music.
Teatro Real has tricked the selling to the whole theatre that evening. There is 50% of audience, but while the house seats share interpersonal distance, the galleries and balconies are completely full with people wearing mask. Because those are the entrances that get sold the most because of the lower price.
Audience finds out about this minutes before the opera begins. The balcony audience begin to protest while the Theatre communications warn that they are complying with the admission limits, and offer the protesters to claim their money back. 
Some leave. But protests still go on. The conductor starts out and the opera begins with the audience screaming. 3 minutes in, the performance stops.
Queues of people gather and claim their money back. 
The scandal of tonight is played in context of the very controversial lockdown measures that the Regional Government of Madrid has taken to restrict the movement in several neiborhoods, predominantly populated by working class people who can still go to work to the richest areas of Madrid but cannot really go for a walk. One sentence to explain it is: if you live here you can go to serve beer to customers but you cannot be offered the same service because you cannot afford to live elsewhere. The political climate is fully coronavirus-related in the region, with a government that could be kicked out any time in parliament.

This is not intended to talk about politics. I just wanted to give you some context from a local that follows the news. The question is: Can Big Opera theatres afford a cash-cow opera season if they can't fill the theatre or count with logistics to spare the audience through the seats?


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