The Kennedy Center demands a two-year subscription for some show tickets – including its upcoming production of “Hamilton”. It’s enough to spur frustrated theater fans to compose doggerel in protest (see above).
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Reportedly only 200 tickets will be sold at $849 per performance, and when I last went online to buy Hamilton seats a few weeks ago, I was already seeing original sale tickets at over $500. That’s not just good old-fashioned American capitalism: it’s to try and neutralise the touts buying the bulk of the show’s tickets and selling them for insane money. Third-party ticket sellers are also making huge (and illegal) profits off of his creation. But at least we get a taste for what it could be like as Leslie Odom Jr. and the rest of the cast give us a glimpse of the show in this special 360-degree video promoting the Tonys! “Brokers use bots to connect at lightning speed”, explains the playwright, “and gobble up as many hot tickets as possible, then offer them on legal resale sites like StubHub”. Many consumers can’t afford to shrug off the disappointment and pay double or more for tix from resellers.
He said he arrived at the $849 price point by “continually monitoring the secondary market and finding out where the average is”.
In April, a New York Times profile revealed that producer Jeffrey Seller was working with Mackintosh on a production of the musical to open in London, which Seller claimed would be followed by companies in continental Europe and Australia. “That is just not fair”, he told Jones, “and it does not help the theater”. NY attorney general Eric Schneiderman published a report on the issue earlier this year, which proved that sites were illegally bypassing CAPTCHAs and other security measures to purchase hundreds, and sometimes thousands of tickets at once.
Be prepared to fork over a lot more Hamiltons to see the Broadway smash “Hamilton”. First, he’s planning to charge – wait for it – $500 for premium seats, $600 over the holidays.
In other words: Good luck and Godspeed. If he can get even more, he’ll do it. The 1,075 or so remaining spots, which were priced from $139 to $177, will now go for between $179 and $199.
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Ticket bots are illegal in NY, but “the problem will persist until we strengthen the existing law and make this recurrent illegal behavior a felony”, according to Miranda.
