| re: Ticket Prices: Stop Complaining - no good old days. | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 03:57 am EST 11/26/24 | |
| In reply to: Ticket Prices: Stop Complaining - no good old days. - Musicals54 01:59 pm EST 11/25/24 | |
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| I'm a little confused by a couple of things but I will try to go through them one at a time. I looked at The South Pacific Companion because I wondered if there was a source for the $500 figure. There isn't one that I can see. It may be that a very few times seats were sold for that, but both the New York Times and Variety (and I'm sure other papers but those were the two I looked at) reported on what scalpers were getting for South Pacific. For two excellent seats on a few days' notice, it was generally $40 to $50. For less good seats with more advance time, it might be $15. So I think this $500 for a pair was some extreme case (and I still wonder what Maslon's source was). Are you saying that when Cabaret was charging $2 for the last two rows upstairs, it wasn't selling out, but when the prices were raised, it did sell out? If so, that's not correct. It was selling out during previews and became an extremely hot ticket the moment it opened. It sold out every week for months, both at the Broadhurst (where those $2 seats were the best deal in town as the Broadhurst is one of the few Broadway theatres where I’d rather sit in the last row of the mezzanine than in the last few rows of the orchestra, or at least I would if not for the leg-room problem) and at the larger Imperial. And Prince never raised the low price of $2 to a higher price, not even at the end of the run. Enter Laughing never raised its ticket prices. It never played a sold-out week. It was a mild hit, or at least that’s how it seemed when it closed. It had made a decent profit when it closed. According to Variety the profit was $25,000 on an $80,000 investment, although Variety later reported that it cost only $59,000 to open. Around a year after the Broadway closing, Columbia bought the film rights for $225,000 plus 25 percent of any profit the film made. This raised the profit to $165,000 (with the production getting the standard 40 percent of the film rights, minus a 10 percent commission). I don’t know how much more eventually came in, but the investors did end up doing very nicely indeed from a show that seemed a very mild hit while it was running. Anyway, that was more info than you were looking for or that I was planning to find, but when I get started, I sometimes just gotta keep going (even when I have more important things to do). I have to agree with those who have said that with a show like South Pacific, you could, if you were willing to wait (or perhaps get on a cancellation line), see it for that top price of $6 and from very good seats. Or less for less good seats. Did it stink that seats were being sold by scalpers for then-exorbitant prices and that therefore people had to wait longer to see it for box-office prices than would have otherwise been the case? Yes. Is it better now that the creatives get the extra money? Sure, at least in theory. But now for the in-demand shows (and sometimes even for shows not that much in demand), there simply are no tickets for good seats available for prices within the budgets of even many people who are reasonably well-off, unless people want to make a big hit the only show they see this year (and maybe next year, too). And then there is the constant checking and re-checking for when prices might go down. Did the old system have problems? Of course, and they were big ones. But even with its problems, I think it was a better system than what we have now. |
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| Previous: | re: Ticket Prices: Stop Complaining - no good old days. - emmemmkay 05:36 am EST 11/26/24 |
| Next: | re: Ticket Prices: Stop Complaining - no good old days. - StevenA 06:41 pm EST 11/25/24 |
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