Companies large and small are trying to tempt youngsters into the opera house with a variety of community-minded programs.

San Francisco Opera has its youngest fans to thank for selling out its Community Open House in the fall.

“We had kids from basically babes in arms all the way up to teenagers,” says Ellen Presley, the company’s special project manager. On Octo­ber 23, about 2,200 visitors of all ages arrived at the War Memorial Opera House. Kids played with props in the lobby, took conducting lessons, and hopped on the operatic stage for the first time for a guided tour. “The tours were a total sellout,” Presley says.

The company isn’t alone in attempting to bring fresh faces to the opera. Other companies across the coun­try have also programmed family-friendly events in recent years to entice families with children to give the art form a try.

Some, like Colorado’s Cen­tral City Opera (CCO), have made such events a part of their regular program­ming. Because most of its audience is made up of tour­ists, often with children in tow, CCO adds a fam­ily day to one of its festival productions each summer. The family-friendly Opera Adventures program includes a range of child-friendly activities as a separately tick­eted event available before a matinee performance.

It’s a smaller, more inti­mate experience. Typically, a few dozen attend each Opera Adventures program. Margaret Ozaki Graves, CCO’s associate director of education and community engagement, remembers her experience as a teaching art­ist for Opera Adventures in 2019. “It was nice to give the students a way in,” she says, explaining that host­ing Opera Adventures before the matinee proved a way to help kids connect bet­ter with the performance.

Other companies are experimenting with larg­er-scale community day formats. In June, Cincinnati Opera organized its own free community open house for a crowd of about 500. Young people and adults could visit the costume dress-up shop or swing by a “Face the Music Mask Making Station,” in addition to onstage tours and other demos. After the open house, the crowd swelled to thousands for the opera’s annual Opera in the Park concert, a free outdoor event.

Cincinnati Opera is mak­ing a concerted effort to foster relationships with the city that reach beyond the concert hall. Longtime partners like the Cincin­nati Ballet and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra helped make the day happen, as did less conventional partners ranging from the Cincinnati Zoo to a neighborhood ice cream chain. “Board mem­bers were like, ‘We need to do this before every opera,’” says Tracy L. Wilson, the compa­ny’s director of community engagement and education. She adds that there’s inter­est in reprising the event, but no concrete plans yet, as such events are pricey.

In San Francisco as well, even though the open house sold out, SFO hasn’t pulled the trigger on decid­ing whether it’ll reprise the open house, which was only made possible through high­er-than-usual donations for special initiatives during the opera’s centennial sea­son. Plus, the company is continuing to evaluate how many people will continue to interact with its other offerings, whether that’s buying a ticket to a main­stage show or attending another community event.

Overall, there’s been lots of positive, anecdotal feedback. Presley recalls a particularly positive response to a survey after the open house: “Their 12-year-old now says opera is cool,” she says, laughing.