Summer Theatre Burgas

Worth a detour

From June to September most of what is worth doing after dark in Burgas happens here: the opera, the drama company, touring bands, festivals and the municipal programme all move outdoors into a bowl of seats under the pines. Tickets are cheap, the sea is a hundred metres away, and even a mediocre show is redeemed by the setting. Check what is on before you book a restaurant.

Story

Background

The Summer Theatre opened in 1957 and sits in the middle of the Sea Garden, a short walk north of the casino. It is a conventional open-air auditorium — raked seating, a wide stage, no roof — and the municipal enterprise that runs it puts the capacity at one thousand nine hundred and seventy seats, with standing room beyond that. The stage carries ten automatic hoists and is equipped for film projection and live broadcast.

In practice the summer here is dense. The Emil Chakarov Burgas music festival ran from the first of July to the first of September, every dated performance of it on this stage. The international folklore festival and the national popular-song competition Burgas and the Sea both use it, the opera and the drama company relocate here, and touring bands play it. The Sea Garden's other stage, the open-air platform called the Snail beside the casino, takes the smaller and mostly free concerts, so on a July evening there is usually something on within two hundred metres whether or not you have a ticket.

Two practical notes. Nothing at all happens here between October and May — the theatre is simply shut, and a visitor in winter should look at the opera house and the drama theatre instead. And the bowl faces the sea: when the wind gets into the north the temperature in the upper rows drops sharply after dark, which catches out people who walked up from the beach in what they were wearing at six.