If you want to see Paranoid Social Club at the Rochester Opera House on Saturday, July 8, then you should plan ahead, because tickets will not be available at the door.

The Opera House was recently made aware of a regulation of the N.H. Liquor Commission that affects how and when they can sell tickets to some of their events. According to the Liquor Commission, events where off-site caterers will serve alcohol must be invitation only; they cannot be open to the public. For the Rochester Opera House—which doesn’t serve alcohol at all events, but plans on doing so for its summer concerts—this means all tickets to a concert must be sold before the show begins.

“It was definitely a surprise,” says Thomas Hensel, the Opera House’s executive director. A licensing specialist informed Hensel of the Opera House’s status a week before an Entrain concert on Saturday, June 10.

“It’s very difficult, because people are used to buying tickets at the door on the day of the show,” he says. “There’s always people who reserve tickets and don’t show up, and it’s nice to be able to sell those tickets.”

Without the option of making tickets available at show time, Hensel has to shift how he goes about promoting a show and selling tickets.

“We got our sponsors to be a little more aggressive about getting tickets out, and we took out a few more ads on the radio,” he says.

All tickets for Entrain were sold by the day before the show, but Hensel is considering how he will promote other upcoming shows, such as the Paranoid Social Club concert, which includes openers The Fiends, The Screen and Wize Crackaz, and a John Eddie concert with Jon Nolan and Hokum on July 15.

“Now I have to rethink how I put it out there,” he says. “I might be able to get around it. I’ll just have to be more creative. I wish I could tell you how.”

Hensel said that online ticketing will be available until one hour before the start of the show in an attempt to extend ticket availability.

While the Opera House was not aware of this specific regulation, it has, according to Lieutenant Lisa Soiett of the Enforcement and Licensing division of the Liquor Commission, been in effect “for quite a while.” Soiett said that a violation like the Rochester Opera House’s is not unusual, and the Opera House will not be fined.

“Mistakes happen,” she says. “Luckily we caught it quickly enough for them to come into compliance.”

Soiett says that the legislative intent of RSA 178:22 (on-premise cocktail lounge license subsection E for caterers on and off site) was to ensure that caterers—who can, according to their liquor licenses, serve alcohol without serving food, unlike traditional bars and restaurants—weren’t able to serve to the general public.

“Each license and business has different statutory requirements, and I think that across the board those requirements are fair,” she says.

Hensel says the Opera House will continue to use off-site caterers for its events, rather than acquiring a one-day license for each event, which would require somebody from the Opera House attending a licensing course, in addition to the Opera House having to procure the alcohol to be served.

“It’s so much easier to hire someone who’s already licensed,” he says.
While the regulation complicates things for Hensel and the Opera House, he doesn’t see anyway of having it changed.

“There are certain levels of authority you run into and there’s no way around them. Unfortunately, when it comes to the Liquor Commission, they’re it.”