There are currently some people paying thousands for a ticket to the Broadway hit from secondary sources, but according to the New York Times, this is the highest price for a direct ticket on Broadway ever:
“The Book of Mormon” has long had the most expensive premium ticket on Broadway — last week that show topped out at $477 — and until now “Hamilton” has been lagging slightly behind, at $475 last week.
In the new block of tickets, about 200 seats at every “Hamilton” performance — mostly in the center orchestra — will be sold for $849. The rest of the house — everything but the lottery tickets, or about 1,075 seats per show — will be sold for between $179 and $199 (currently, the regular seats are priced from $139 to $177).
To balance this price hike, the show is doubling the number of lottery tickets at $10 from 21 seats to 42. More than 10,000 people enter the lottery for these tickets every day.
Lead producer Jeffrey Sellers says that he came to the price hike decision because he’s annoyed that others are making money off the resale value (a topic Lin-Manuel Miranda recently wrote about for the NYT op-ed section):
“What has certainly been frustrating to me, as a business owner, is to see that my product is being resold at many times its face value and my team isn’t sharing in those profits,” the lead producer of “Hamilton”… It’s not fair.”
“How did I get to $849? By continually monitoring the secondary market and finding out where the average is… If I’m at $849, I think we may succeed in taking the motivation out of the scalpers to buy those tickets.”
Maybe not. According to the New York Post, Miranda’s departure from the show has blown the market’s expectations wide open:
…The average secondary market ticket asking price for Miranda’s last show the night of July 9 was $4,798.97, with the lowest price to get in the door hovering around $2,319.
In comparison, the average asking price for all previous “Hamilton” performances was $1,293.99 — 73 percent lower than the for Miranda’s last show.
The most expensive single ticket sold, so far, through TiqIQ for the 8 p.m. performance went for $6,600 — for an Orchestra seat, Matcovich said.
But as far as a single purchase goes, the high so far is the $20,800 that one person shelled out to buy four tickets nearby.
It’ll be easier to see what the price differential between scalped tickets and legitimate ones is after that bonanza dies down, but all these changes just confirm for me what I already knew: I will never see Hamilton on Broadway.
Image via Getty.
