North Rustico’s Watermark Theatre is by no means the smallest venue on P.E.I., but with 100 seats, it’s not very big, either.
Watermark’s manager of administration and marketing, Lara Dias, calls it “intimate.” The theatre is not-for-profit and is open year-round, typically presenting two plays and a music series in the summer, another play in the fall, and an original production at Christmas.
For all those events, you can buy tickets either online or in person — with the convenience factor part of what it takes to get people in the door.
“All of our costs are going up,” said Dias, who’s been with Watermark since 2021. “We look to see how we can minimize costs without compromising any of the quality of our productions.”
Around the time Dias started, the theatre was transitioning away from its old online ticketing platform. That was local company Ticket Wizard, which now focuses primarily on selling for Chase the Ace lotteries.
Up until 2016, P.E.I.’s government operated its own ticketing system, BoxOffice PEI. But some venues considered leaving the platform in 2013 after it started charging fees.
Dias said the Watermark thought about going with Eventbrite, based in San Francisco, “but we didn’t want to go to that level just because we knew that there was a lot of fees involved, and we really wanted to stay local.”
