Tag Archives: Broadway premium tickets

A Look Back: Premium tickets: Don’t bring us your poor

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At this point, Broadway may as well rename itself Martha’s Vineyard. The NY Times reports this weekend that the still-previewing production of Othello with megastars Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal has a top price of $921 for a single seat and has attracted an average — average! — ticket price of $361.90. That’s before the show has even opened or been reviewed. Its lowest-priced ticket for full-view seats is $197, and even those seats are reportedly scarcer than usual.

Yes, it’s a star vehicle, the producers are simply responding to demand, costs are high, there are other lower-priced shows, and so on. But basically this is a show for the rich; the rest of America need not apply. While it’s heartening in a way that Shakespeare can command the highest prices on Broadway, the message that this is sending is going to drive away a large segment of the population, an ominous development for the industry. People may go to specific shows, and tourists will always be there. But is there going to be anything like a theatergoing habit in the future? Producers have created a cost structure that is going to strangle them in the end. Continue reading →

Premium tickets: Don’t bring us your poor

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  • Premium tickets: Don’t bring us your poor

10/10/17 (Tues)

Add another exclamation point to Hello, Dolly! The NY Times reports that premium tickets to the mega-hit between now and the departure of superstar Bette Midler in January will go for an eye-popping $998. That “98” sounds like Walmart marking its prices just short of the next dollar mark, and it would be nice to think that the producers are embarrassed enough to want to avoid four figures. But we know, of course, that they don’t care a whit about what anyone thinks given the overwhelming demand and limited supply for their tickets (which will actually cost $1,009 with Ticketmaster’s usurious charges, reaching four figures anyway).

Once upon a time, the theater was at least nominally an egalitarian business: you stood in line, you got your tickets when your turn came around. You knew that everyone else in an orchestra seat paid the same as you did (other than perhaps discounted day seats). Black, white, male, female, American, foreign, tall, short: everyone had an equal chance at getting a ticket. Yes, scalpers always existed, and we all knew that the rich weren’t standing in any line for their tickets. But we could comfort ourselves with the knowledge that scalping at outrageous prices was at least illegal. Now it’s the producers themselves who are charging those prices, claiming that they’re being deprived of all that illegal money. Got it? Instead of finding ways to prevent illegitimate activity, they’ve simply made it legitimate.

They have every right to do so, of course; no one is forcing the public to buy tickets, and allowing supply/demand to determine prices is the very basis of capitalism. The limited supply of tickets has to be allocated somehow, and doing that through pricing is no less legitimate than through first-come, first-served, i.e., time vs. money. What that means in real life, though, is that like elsewhere in our society, the rich go to the front of the ticket line, and you, the not-rich, go to the back. The theatrical community no longer even pretends to be treating everyone equally. Fair enough. But when the largely left-of-center Broadway community goes on about diversity and the poor and undocumented immigrants and all that, their words ring awfully hollow.

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