In return – in accordance with the guidelines – all visitors must be vaccinated three times and present a PCR test. All other theater and opera houses in Austria have reduced their capacities to less than 1000 seats, where two vaccinations plus a PCR test are sufficient.
After three days, the résumé of this regulation turns out to be mixed, says director Bogdan Roscic: “You can’t gloss over the first balance sheet.” The reason for the decision was that well over 1000 tickets were booked for performances every day in January: “We are not entitled to hand over the audience. And it would be somehow absurd to send hundreds of visitors away so that the rest of them have less strict access conditions . “
Difficult conditions
However, fulfilling all the requirements is not easy, as Roscic describes using the example of “Tosca”, which was originally 97 percent fully booked, on December 27th: 500 tickets were canceled in advance due to the restrictions. Another 200 people had to be turned away in the evening, mainly tourists who could not get booster vaccinations in their home countries, or families with unvaccinated children over the age of twelve. “You can guess what kind of scenes happened there,” says Roscic.
Whether the State Opera will keep this regulation will be decided in the next few days: “That depends on the demand under the current conditions.”
Source: Nachrichten
