Bruce, About Those Tickets….

Bruce Springsteen on Broadway is a huge hit. From all accounts, audiences are rapturous and Springsteen is enjoying the experience enough to have extended the run through June. When it was announced in the fall everyone knew that there would be enormous demand for tickets. Springsteen and the producers said there should be no gouging on ticket prices and declared they were using a new system to stops bots and the secondary market. The official prices for seats at the Walter Kerr Theater, a relatively cozy venue with 960 places, went from $75 to $875. Within days, there were seats going for as much as $8500, according to the New York Times.

Nonetheless, in early January, anticipating my wife’s birthday in late May, I started to look for tickets, as a surprise gift. You can’t reach the box office by phone. Ticketmaster told me that tickets for May had not yet gone on sale and signed me up for an alert when they did. Hearing nothing further, I went to the theater in late February. The surly woman in charge of the box office told me that all seats for the duration had been sold. She handed me a card to join the daily lottery at LuckySeats.com. According to the Times, 26 seats at each performance were to be available through the lottery at $75, with the caveat that they might not be available for every performance.

I called a friend who had been to the show to find out what he had done for tickets. Scalpers, he said, and paid multiples of the $875 price. Friends with longstanding “connections” in the theater world said that the mission to buy tickets openly was hopeless, even for them. I looked up prices in the secondary market. There were a few for more or less the list price (meaning a minimum of $875 but not in prime locations). But the great majority of the seats started at $1000+ for the balcony, relatively cheap by scalper standards, but probably four times the price for a seat in the rafters.

So I’ll join the lottery. I’ve already lost once. This is undoubtedly a very cool show. But getting to see it is a dreary scramble and a financial ordeal beyond even its real value.

This is an open note to Bruce. Can’t you or your people do better than this?