Just too popular for its own good

As the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City prepared for its first opening -- the premiere of Charles L. Mee’s “A Perfect Wedding” -- some of the theater’s would-be subscribers learned they would be shut out.

The response to last summer’s solicitations for subscriptions at the Center Theatre Group’s new Westside outpost was so heavy that certain performances were overbooked. Some people who thought they were buying subscriptions learned otherwise when they called to check on their orders. The rest found out soon after Oct. 27, when CTG’s audience services department mailed a letter to 150 households informing them that their requests could not be accommodated.

The subscribers who were figuratively left at the altar were told that some seats were held back to resolve seating errors and that CTG would call hopefuls back according to when their original orders were received. After receiving a call, they would have 48 hours to decide if they wanted to accept the seats being offered. The letter said that at least a few canceled subscriptions were expected after patrons saw “A Perfect Wedding” (which opened last Sunday) and that people still on the waiting list would be offered a chance to subscribe at that point.

In the meantime, the involuntary de-subscribers also were offered two free tickets to “Caroline, or Change,” now at the Ahmanson Theatre.

“We didn’t anticipate that this theater would be this popular,” says Jim Royce, CTG director of marketing and communications. About 8,000 seats will be available for each production, and CTG received 6,103 orders for subscribed seats. The company had decided to sell a maximum of 6,000 seats to subscribers, reserving most of the others for single-ticket buyers.

The processing was also delayed because of uncertainty about the number of seats in the new facility. That number wasn’t set at 315 until the end of September, Royce says.