Unmasking L.A.’s New Matinee Idle

It will be considerably quieter this afternoon around the Music Center. No motorists scouting unfamiliar parking entrances, no panicky ticket buyers, no actors casually making up.

For the first time in two-plus years, no midweek matinee at the Ahmanson, no Thursday afternoon performance for what many consider the hottest ticket in Los Angeles, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera.”

It’s move-out time for the matinee crowd.

Death, life and economic reality in the afternoon. Now if you’re in the market for a bargain-priced ticket, check the afternoon movie listings, or sign up for the limited number of theatrical previews.

American entertainment habits are experiencing a see-change of sorts. We have become night or weekend people, jamming our going out into the evenings or the 48 hours starting Friday night. So, the matinee is no longer what it once was. Now you pay the same for most weekend matinees as you do for evening performances.

With the “Phantom” matinees now scheduled only on Saturdays and Sundays, we are a town with barely any midweek matinees. But what has happened is more than just time shifting and ticket price boosting.

Television daytime viewing over the last five years has been taking a few hits too. One way the Nielsen people measure viewership is with what they call the HUT level, which stands for “homes using TV,” a measure of television sets on, not necessarily being watched. The HUT findings: Fewer sets were on during the days of the ‘90-’91 season than were on five years ago; 27.6% dropped to 26.9%. The number of viewers also declined one full percentage point during the same period, Nielsen said.

Movie exhibitors, however, see all sorts of hope in the afternoons, apparently thinking if you stay open and do some pricing magic, somebody will show up. They’ve been practicing what they call tiered and niche pricing since multi-screens started multiplying throughout the country. Tiered pricing gets you a discounted ticket at noon or 2 or 3 at many movie houses. Niche pricing, for example, gets you a cut rate if you’re of a certain senior age.

Some movie exhibitors say their matinee audiences fill about 20% of the house and that’s OK. Twenty percent is better than zero percent.

Now the stage people are facing up to changes in their audiences. There has always been something suggestively decadent, maybe quaintly and comfortably elitist about matinees: afternoon show time, blue-haired midweek madness. Actors call them two-a-days.

What the so-called midweek businessman’s special is to baseball, the matinee has been to the stage--a means of slipping off, to dream perhaps, to fantasize while all those others are stuck at work.

The new strategies of theater matinees reflect economic and social change in much of the entertainment business: Competition and costs are fierce combatants, so traditions become endangered. Now you have to go where the audiences are.

Consider these changes in our social fabric:

* That staple of traditional matinee-going--the midtown and suburban matron--may not have the time anymore for tea and theater on a Wednesday or Thursday. She’s probably at work, trying to keep up, or her companions are. Or she is a docent or a volunteer or involved in family matters during the week. Or she stays home with Oprah, Geraldo, et al. (New York’s Broadway, with its defined district and its tourist trade and its continuing theatrical traditions, may be the only non-festival place left in the country that regularly attracts afternoon audiences, but unlike Los Angeles, it tends to ignore Sunday matinees.)

* That staple of Southern California, the motorist, has been balking at daytime business day parking rates. That’s one reason the Shubert Theatre in Century City gave up on midweek matinees; parking prices were going stride for stride with theater prices.

* Another former staple, school groups on an afternoon cultural binge, long ago lost out to the slash-and-burn new math of our educational budgeteers.

There’s another factor in our changing pursuit of pleasure and entertainment. It’s a new social staple of a sort, and that’s the working couple who find they only have time for entertainment when they both have the same days off and they have someone who can stay with the kids. Weekends have become their days of opportunity.

Last year, the heavy thinkers of the “Phantom” box office began to think the same way and to speak the unspeakable. Tickets weren’t quite selling as passionately as they once were for Thursday’s matinee. There was still as much as a 12-week wait for many of the evening and weekend performances. Thursday afternoon was the weakest of the week, a hard sell. Yet the Saturday matinee was doing well, and so were other weekend matinees in Los Angeles. So this week the cheaper, slower-selling Thursday matinee tickets became collector’s items. The Sunday matinee became the replacement, its ticket prices reflecting a new egalitarian spirit, rising to the same level as evening prices.

The two-a-day is now the four-a-weekend. And weekend matinee audiences now do what the old midweek crowd did, but in reverse: first to the theater, then to the restaurant. And home early. And parking? Cheaper when those working people aren’t around.

Occasionally, a visiting show sticks with the traditional and schedules a cluster of midweek matinees as the Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca group did recently, finding the show had a “certain demographic pull” in the afternoon, as one publicist said. But the only major theater in town with any sort of midweek matinee is the Ahmanson at the Doolittle--and it has cut its usual number of Thursday matinees in half and added Sunday afternoon performances.

The Pasadena Playhouse has one-upped everyone else at the box office with its weekend scheduling: a Sunday matinee followed by an evening performance (both with evening prices), but no Saturday matinee because it has two evening performances: The sunset show at 5 and another at 9. Same ticket prices for both.

The origins of matinee-going are uncertain. Some people claim early theater was always a daytime thing, before there were electric lights, air conditioning and body mikes. In more modern times, matinees have become an economic necessity.

They’re also a mathematical puzzler: How do you get an 8 out of a 6? Most producers find that scheduling eight shows within a week is about the only way to meet the gross or make a profit. Discounting generally dark Mondays, that leaves six evenings and two afternoons. So when a Maggie Smith or a Dustin Hoffman, because of the demands of a role, says seven is the limit, the producer has to squeeze somewhere, cut costs somewhere, push up prices you know where.

Same thing with a weakening box office. You try groups and gimmicks, you try discounts. You trim costs if you can and maybe you push up prices you know where.

Some theater managers see the midweek matinee as a sort of phantom audience. There’s something out there but they can’t quite hold onto it. But these weekend two-a-days-two-a-days, ahhhhh, that’s something they can grasp.