Last season the company dropped just six percent from its previous playing capacity of 90% at the Ordway Center for Performing Arts, which company president Kevin Smith attributed to lagging ticket sales at the season's start and one production fewer than in the season prior. The company's May run of The Marriage of Figaro was its bestselling production while Ricky Ian Gordon's The Grapes of Wrath, a world premiere, sold out every performance.
Also revealed were initial plans for repertory programming through 2013, based around three initiatives: each season there will be new works or the revisiting of recent ones, a production of one of Donizetti's Tudor trilogy, and productions of standard works — each done no more than once every ten years.
