The Canadian Badlands Passion Play has had one of its most successful seasons yet setting records along the way.
“We had the single largest performance of the passion play, and that was 2,626,” said general manager Vance Neudorf. “We’ve never had that many people.”
He said it was a sell out, although about 24 people didn’t show up to fill the complete 2,650 seats.
While it was a great year, he said it wasn’t quite what they were hoping for.
“I think the rain played heavily on that,” he said. We were well ahead of the previous year, but with four weeks to go orders began not being as consistent.”’
The total of 12,273 was above last year’s total but not quite as strong as they were striving for.
“Going into the last four weeks we were 1,000 ahead of last year, but then we ended up basically even,” he said. “A lot of people were basically waiting until the week of, that’s when we sell a lot of tickets, and that just seemed to be down this year.”
He said by and large patrons of the Canadian Badlands Passion Play pre order their tickets. During the final days, many are watching the weather reports, and that is one of the reasons he expects the sales were down.
The Passion Play is embarking on an exciting step next season as they are planning to introduce a new script.
“We were sort of waffling, this script has been so successful. Do we do it now? Is it the right time? We’ve looked at it from many different angles and said ‘this is it,’” said Neudorf.
Royal Sproule has been charged with writing a new script.
“It’s not finished yet but it has some really interesting components to it. I think it is going to be a really interesting script to watch,” said Neudorf. “It is going to be a really enjoyable play to watch.”