If you are an IUP student, the likelihood that you have been to a performance brought to campus by OnStage is pretty slim.
While the organization brings the occasional performance that is interesting to the people of Indiana who aren’t staring retirement in the face, most of the shows they sponsor don’t sell any significant number of tickets to students.
They hit the mark once or twice a year with a popular musical – this year it was the raunchy puppets of Avenue Q, which sold out and clearly had a college audience.
But the other shows – Michael McDonald? Lord of the Dance? Clearly, the 18-25 crowd was not the target audience. And this has been the pattern with OnStage events.
The Co-op board made the right move in denying OnStage funding for the 2010-11 school year. Out of 13 shows this season, less than five could easily be considered as targeted to the demographics of university students.
The reported ticket sales have confirmed this. Student ticket sales for most OnStage shows were abysmal, even when they were discounted to $10.
If OnStage wants funding that comes mostly out of students’ pockets, it needs to schedule a season of shows for which students, not community members, are the target audience.
The benefits that the OnStage program is supposed to provide student audience members is barely beneficial.
Everyone knows that we stereotypical college students never have any money – and unless you were willing to tempt fate and wait until the last second to buy tickets, you usually had to pay at least $20, often for the worst seats in the house.
How is that beneficial to students? If part of our activity fee goes to sponsor a program that caters more to year-round Indiana residents than university students, something is wrong. That is not how university programs are supposed to work.
You rarely hear people say that denying funding for an arts program was the right decision, but in this case it was.
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