Mumbai: BookMyShow has announced The Great Indian theatre festival that aims to bring the theatre talent and the theatre hungry audiences together.
The festival has an impressive line-up of productions such as Macbeth, Hamlet, Nothing Like Lear, I Don’t Like It As You Like It, Hello Zindagi, Dhumrapan, Shikhandi, A Few Good Men, August – Osage Country, Ovee – The Haunted Hostel, Salaam Noni Aapa and Mirror Mirror, to name a few.
In an exclusive conversation with Medianews4u, Albert Almeida, COO – Live Entertainment, BookMyShow spoke about what made them create this property, the challenges that the theatre industry is facing and how BookMyShow is working towards overcoming those challenge.
On the demand of theatre in India, Almeida, said “Our belief is that and we saw it through the fact that we do all kinds of sizes of theatre, which includes the big-ticket shows that we import and we’ve been co-promoters of regional theatre, where the ticket sizes are much smaller and the quality of the production is basic. But the demand of those shows is so high that they easily complete 150 shows before you know. So that just tells you that there is an appetite and there is a community wants to consume theatre.”
Continuing, Almeida said, “India’s evolved so much, especially the Tier two cities, where more and more people have seen affluence come rapidly to them on the back of them being very industrious.”
On BookMyShow’s role Almeida said, “As a platform that has got scale, reach, and has the ability to cater great experiences. Let’s make the investment where we get the community of talent, get the community of content together and say, We will now be the promoter partner to this aggregate community.”
When we asked him as to how difficult is it for BookMyShow to get people out of their binge-watching habits on OTT platforms to go watch a play, Almeida said, “There is no denying the fact that the OTT economy is growing. I believe that they both co-exist. In fact, it’s just aided with better storytelling. I think now you’re finding that even in the live space, there is comedy, but there is a new genre evolving, where you have open spaces, where people just go out there and tell stories.”
“And you have audiences coming to listen to stories. And if you look at it’s a time in our lives where I want to hear and absorb more and more stories, like don’t do hear people saying, What are you watching? What are you seeing? What are you going out for? It’s all because now you you’ve hooked somebody on to a new genre of content.”
Almeida believes that it’s all about the experience that BookMyShow promises to offer be it any live event and theatre is nothing but storytelling in its purest form.” I think when consumers come out of home for a live experience, the social context the community that you watch it within, it’s a very different high and therefore, I think that it augers well, I think great content pushes people to watch more content. And that’s what we should look at it.” said Almeida.
