Passport to Awesome?

Before my mental breakdown yesterday, I went and bought my passport for the the Festival Montréal Complètement Cirque. The way it works is, you choose three shows that you want to see right off the bat, pay the taxes and service charges on those tickets, and $100 for the actual passport. From then on, you need to go to either the venue of the show you wish to see or La Vitrine to obtain tickets for the other shows on the roster. The catch is, you can only get those tickets 24 hours in advance.

There are a lot of shows. And I'm pretty sure it's impossible to see them all, passport or not. Many of them have a very short run and the times and dates overlap. So I made my list as best I could, knowing there would be some shows that I just wouldn't get around to seeing.

I went to La Vitrine this afternoon to pick up a ticket for tomorrow only to be told the show I wanted to see was already sold out and that I couldn't have a place for that night. When I asked the man at the desk what the point of having a passport was if I couldn't even see the shows I wanted to see when I wanted to see them I was told:

"Already, three shows for $100 is a good deal."

Only guess what, buddy? With services charges, I paid $119 for those three shows. And had I paid the $39 for each individual ticket, I would have had much better seats than what I was given with the passport and money left over to boot! So no, the three shows for $100 isn't such a great deal. Besides, last year there was a promotion where you could see three shows for $30. So again, not such a great deal.

Of course, in the end, I will see more than three shows with my passport. But so far, the whole "All the shows for $100!" is a flat out lie.

Circus Passport? You've got some redeeming to do...