The Limelight Theatre has thirteen performances of To Kill A Mockingbird on sale at 11 Old Mission Avenue between Thursday and Nov. 8, four of them are marked sold out on the theatre’s own ticketing page, and three of those four are the only three Sunday matinees in the run. The house at the top of Uptown has sold its entire Sunday business before a single preview audience has been in the room.

The fourth is opening night.

Those four dates are Friday, Oct. 23, Sunday, Oct. 25, Sunday, Nov. 1 and Sunday, Nov. 8, the last of which the page marks Final Performance. The pattern they make is one a box office manager would recognize before an audience would, because the matinee crowd books early and the evening crowd books late, and a run that is gone on Sundays in its first week has priced its Sundays below what the market would bear.

The mainstage is the Inez McDonald Theatre, which the theatre’s own page calls an intimate 127-seat mainstage, and that is the number making the rest of this arithmetic legible. A sold-out Sunday here is a hundred and twenty-seven people rather than a thousand. The second house, the Matuza Black Box, holds ninety on a general-admission layout and is named for Ray and Linda Matuza, whose donations the page credits with getting the theatre running in 1993.

What a seat costs, and what the card costs you

The page prints no per-performance ticket price anywhere on it, and the only place a figure appears at all is the paragraph explaining subscriptions, which offers subscribers a seat at “$34 instead of $35/40.” A Double Subscription is sixteen tickets at $550 and a Single Subscription is eight tickets at $275. Dividing either package by its ticket count gives a little more than $34 rather than the flat $34 advertised, so the advertised figure sits about thirty-eight cents a seat below what the package actually works out to.

Then there is the fee, which is the part of this page worth reading twice: “All credit card transactions will include a processing fee of 5.0% + 0.85 cents per ticket purchased,” with checks and cash exempt and cash required to be exact. Five percent of a $40 seat is two dollars before the per-ticket charge, which makes the Limelight one of the few rooms in this county where the posted price and the paid price differ by whether you brought bills. The box office that takes those bills is open Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., which is to say during the working day and never on a Sunday when three of its houses are full. Exchanges want twenty-four hours’ notice and may carry what the page calls a small exchange fee, which it does not price.

The Saturday that is not at half past seven

Saturday, Oct. 31 is a 2 p.m. curtain and every other Saturday in the run is 7:30, which makes it the single most mis-rememberable line on the schedule. It is also Halloween. A patron who has come to this theatre for a decade and knows that Saturdays are evenings will arrive at a dark building at twenty past seven on a night the show finished four hours earlier.

The money paragraph

The theatre is a 501(c)(3), and its page credits, in one sentence, the Department of State’s Division of Cultural Affairs, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture, the St. Johns Cultural Council, the St. Johns County Tourist Development Council and the Community Foundation for Northeast Florida, with performances funded in part by a grant from South Arts in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts. It gives no amount against any of them and no year in which any of it ends.

That is the same shape the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum’s funding line takes four streets away, where the Tourist Development Council is also credited with no figure beside it. In both cases the amount is a county number that exists on the county’s side of the transaction and not on the recipient’s page, and nobody has asked for either one yet.

The rest of Season 35, and the free one

Cinderella: Youth Edition, which the page files as an Education Production, runs Nov. 13 to Nov. 15, and A Christmas Carol: The Musical runs Dec. 10 to Dec. 20. The Carol is the only title in the season whose Saturdays carry both a 2 p.m. and a 7:30 p.m. curtain, on Dec. 12 and Dec. 19. Then Bonnie & Clyde from Jan. 7, The Miss Firecracker Contest from Feb. 4, Matilda from Feb. 25, Ah, Wilderness! from April 1, Songs For A New World for four performances in mid-May, and Dreamgirls from July 8 to Aug. 1.

Five titles carry a Tuesday performance the theatre calls Terrific Tuesday, and the first is Nov. 3, inside the Mockingbird run. The one listing on that page marked free is the backstage tour, at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 28 and on eleven further Wednesdays through Sept. 29, 2027, which is a monthly hour inside a working house and the only thing on the schedule a reader reaches without a card or exact change.

Parking is free in the theatre’s own lot and on the street on Mission Avenue and San Marco Avenue. Mockingbird previews at 7:30 on Thursday, Oct. 22, and the waitlist for the three Sundays is on the ticketing page.