The three million viewers are close. This is the magical number that Catalan theaters recorded in the 2011-2012 season. For this reason, with a 17% increase in audience compared to the previous season, the 2,789,751 spectators in 2022-2023 are a very hopeful figure, approaching the mythical figure. Where a record has been broken is in the collection: 84,899,466 euros, which represents an increase of 28% over the 2021-2022 season, still recovering after the pandemic.
The absolute winner, who might seem to have done some conjuring trick to distance himself so much from the runner-up, is El Mago Pop. With 226,918 spectators at his Victoria theatre, Antonio Díaz and his show Nada es imposible has broken audience records, which in the 200 performances has recorded an average of 96.81% occupancy. The following five shows are Improshow, at Teatreneu (87,252); it is followed by three musicals: Grease, at Tívoli (77,156), Pretty woman, at Apolo (60,051), and L'alegria que passa, at Poliorama (48,931); and the list of honors is rounded off by the adaptation of Laetitia Colombani's novel La trena, directed by Clara Segura al Goya (47,297).
This is what Isabel Vidal, president of the Association of Theater Companies of Catalonia (Adetca) explained yesterday at the SAT Sant Andreu Teatre, hours before the gala Catalunya raises the curtain. As every year, and there have been 32 of them, the show that was held at night at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, which on this occasion was directed by Roger Julià and presented by Oriol Pla, marks the beginning of the season. The actor Joan Pera deserved the honorable mention of the Catalunya de Teatre award for a career dedicated to the theater and the public.
Vidal affirmed that "with a great joint work of the agents of the sector, after the most serious crisis experienced, which prevented the presence of the public in the theaters, we have achieved the second best season in the history of Catalan theater and an absolute record of collection ".
Occupancy of the stands was 60%, which also represents an increase of 11% compared to the previous season. 1,072 shows were performed, offering 12,503 functions, and January was the best theatrical month, with 375,711 spectators.
Regarding the origin of the productions, 66% are Catalan, 20% from the rest of Spain and 14% international. And with respect to the authors, 576 are Catalan (54%), 215 from the rest of Spain (20%) and 281 are international (26%). 43% of the shows were in Catalan (457), 30% in Spanish (317) and 27% in other languages (298).
By genre, the first place is occupied by dramatic shows (44%), which are also the ones that accumulate the largest number of viewers: 1,260,736 (45%). In second place, the audience chooses family shows, in third place is musical theater and opera, followed by dance and music.
For Vidal, the Catalan theater system has become something "complex, organized, structured and in constant evolution", which experiences "an effervescence of talent in the theaters that this year has materialized in multiple successes on the billboards" . Nevertheless, the president of Adetca has not ignored that the arrival of artificial intelligence poses a challenge and has denounced the "censorship that considers artists, creators, programmers, producers, companies and distributors to be instruments at the service of ideology, and considers the public as a mass to be indoctrinated". In his opinion, on the other hand, in the "era of maximum information it is stupid to block freedom of thought and the critical spirit by suspending or not programming shows", with reference to the shows censored by Vox in some Spanish towns.
