Another sign of the Apocalypse...$28K+ theatre tickets!

[Starsky]

I thought it would be nice to take my wife to see Hamilton in Los Angeles so I went to the Pantages Theatre website to see if any tickets were available. I picked a Tuesday night figuring tickets would be cheaper and more available.

I just wanted to have a good time. I don't mind dropping a few bills on good theatre tickets. Instead I was reminded of how truly screwed our economy is. Their website did offer tickets at prices that would seem to indicate that this play is only for the most elite....

This is for a ticket in Row S - the 19th row! [On the Pantages Theatre website. Not some reseller site.] Even the balcony seats were $3-5K each! I didn't bother looking at other dates. It shouldn't require a HELOC to buy theatre tickets.

How ironic that the first successful hip-hop musical would be so elitist and capitalist. (It's one way to beat scalpers at their own game.) I'm guessing that these tickets will be bought by Hollywood entertainment companies/agents/lawyers and written off as a business expense. I'm sure none of Lin-Manuel's family and friends from P.R. could even afford a ticket. I wonder how he feels about that...

 

[braumeister]

I was just reading the other day that nearly all Hamilton tickets are bought from Ticketmaster by bots within a second or two of their becoming available. Individual bot masters buy thousands of them in milliseconds, despite Ticketmaster's best efforts to make that impossible. Then they are resold on a secondary market for outrageous markups.

 

[W2R]

Whew, $28K? That's sheer insanity!

You could buy a HOUSE for that much, in some regions.

Or, you could give a $100 bill to each of 280 lucky strangers.

Or, you could eat lunch out every single day at the same restaurants we eat at, from now through the end of November, WITH NINE FRIENDS and pay for their lunch too.

Or, you could buy 2,800,000 gumballs from a penny gumball machine.

You could buy a pretty red Mazda Miata and endure the jokes about midlife crisis.

 

[audreyh1]

Interesting. What a mess! Congress passed something in Dec.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/30/...amilton-ticket-bots-we-wrote-our-own-bot.html

Congress passes BOTS Act to ban ticket-buying software | Ars Technica

 

[cathy63]

The site you were looking at, tickets-center.com, is actually a 3rd party reseller/aggregator site. The Pantages sells through ticketmaster. Their real webpage is here: Hamilton, an American Musical Show Tickets Los Angeles - The Pantages and as you can see, they have no tickets available for Hamilton.

There are tickets available from 3rd parties for much less than $28K, but they won't be in the center orchestra section.

 

[braumeister]

Hamilton will be opening in London in November, so that might be an option.

We wanted to see Book of Mormon, but tickets were hard to get on Broadway and I hate visiting NYC anyway (I grew up there). So we saw it in London last year, got great seats at a good price and had a terrific time.

 

[2017ish]

...

How ironic that the first successful hip-hop musical would be so elitist and capitalist. .... I'm sure none of Lin-Manuel's family and friends from P.R. could even afford a ticket. I wonder how he feels about that...

Given his background, it isn't so surprising that it is a hot elite ticket... Granted, his grandparents are in P.R., but his family and he are from/in what most would consider elite NY political circles.

Loved the Chernow biography and since youth found Hamilton the most intriguing of the founding fathers, but doubt I'll ever be willing to pay the cost of even non-secondary tickets to the play, much less these....