The Canadian Badlands Passion Play wrapped its cycle of the Gospel of John on Sunday, and is celebrating the success of the season and pinnacle of the 5-year run.
“You are talking about a very historic year, it was the fifth year of a five year run of a script,” said executive director Vance Neudorf. “We had 42 performances of John. We lost two of them; one last year and one this year due to rain. We had over 60,000 people in attendance over that run.”
This season the Passion Play, while losing one performance, was shy of its projection of attendance, by only about 800 patrons.
“The economy and weather definitely played a role this year,” he said. “We were down similar to what the Calgary Stampede was, so we were seeing what people are telling is happening out there province-wide.”
This was the second year they added an extra weekend. He sees some positive results.
“We originally planned to try it for one year, and in that year, we saw that it definitely did some really good things for us as a company. By opening up the third weekend, we didn’t improve our market share, but yet it may have saved our bacon, in the sense that the third weekend accounted for a third of the revenue. Of that, 75 per cent of the people who came said that was the only weekend they could have come. That is the kind of data we are going off, and we’ll be examining our data again this year.”
There is a spin off for the rest of the community.
“It is definitely doing good things for Drumheller, it has spread that activity out. Now there are three full weekends instead of two. In town, it allows everyone a little more reaction time to work with the people that are coming through. I think it is a positive step for everybody, now it is just a matter of us seeing how it is going to work in future years.”
The Passion Play doesn’t see itself as a lone wolf, doing things for its own purposes. From the outset we see ourselves as a community player in the area of tourism and how we can be a part of everything,” he said.
With this in mind, he foresees there could be some challenges coming up with the next season, especially when they are embarking on a new script and all it entails. They are busy with a number of other events that support its efforts.
“There’s Tom Cochrane coming up, there is the Chamber Music Festival and Shakespeare. There are all kinds of things happening, and it’s all good. It is just a matter of arranging things so you can pull off what you need to do next year.”
