Via Arts and Letters Daily is an article by Bailey Sincox about how theater tickets and programs, long regarded as ephemera are becoming increasingly ephemeral thanks to technology.
Tickets and programs had a life measured in terms of the dates of performance. Once the date had passed and the show run completed, tickets and programs had no value. Except in terms of a remembrance of time spent and a record of who contributed to the creation of the show. As Sincox writes, saving those tickets and programs as memorabilia has been practiced for 400-500 years.
But the move to digital delivery on tickets means there isn’t anything to save unless you specifically request to pick up tickets at will call or choose to print at home. Sincox notes that some ticketing services like TodayTix don’t deliver tickets to their app on your phone until 24 hours prior to the show time and then disappear at midnight of the show day.
As for programs, Covid saw an elimination in their use and the post-pandemic period has seen their diminished use as venues trend away from them. Even the vaunted Playbill program one gets at Broadway shows and other venues across the US was impacted as never before in its history:
Playbill’s presses ceased operations between March 2020 and August 2021 for the first time since the magazine’s 1884 founding. As Playbill’s editors reminded readers in the first postvaccine issue, the magazine had not stopped for two world wars, for Y2K, or for anything in between….After August 2021, many theaters made Playbill accessible via QR codes scanned in the lobby, much like the now-ubiquitous virtual restaurant menu
All this being said, Sincox observes near the end of the article that delivery of tickets and program content virtually still has its shortcomings. As a venue manager, I can attest that her struggles in retrieving her tickets on her phone is a common occurrence across the nation, if not the world. In the end, a good many attendees depend on the availability of the ticket office to print hard copies of their tickets so that they and their friends may share an enjoyable experience.