Front of House
Front of House
This is exactly what is... People designated to help out at the front of the venue.
There are 3 distinctive areas in which you can help out.
Box Office
You would be required to sit in the foyer of the theatre with a list of who has booked to come see the show for that particular performance. As the people come in, you will mark off their names, take the money for the tickets and hand the tickets to the audience members. Sometimes people do not reserve their tickets in advance and these are known as 'Walk-ins'. These work in the same way as everyone else, but you would write down their details on the booking sheet. This is a very important job as we need to know how many people are in the theatre at anytime and who they are; if there was an unfortunate event of a fire, we would use this list to ensure everyone was out of the building and accounted for.
To work on the box office you need to be organised, good at mental arithmatic and, of course, good at dealing with the public!
Programme Selling
Again, the title of this role is self explanatory. You would be in pairs, standing at the entrances to the auditorium, selling programmes for that specific production. At the beginning of the perfomance you will be given some change in coins (a 'float') and a pile of programmes.
Other duties involved in this role is opening the entrances (once you have been given the go-ahead by the Stage Manager) so that the public can take their seats, checking that they have the correct tickets for the performance and ripping a corner from the tickets so that they can be counted and double checked against the Booking List in the Box Office (to confirm the number of people in the theatre).
Bar Staff
This is normally organised by the theatre, but if you want to offer your services and have worked behind a bar before, there is often opportunities for you to help out in the area. If you would like to know who to contact about this, get in touch and we will point you in the right direction.