Toes Finally Defrosted

(Written at 11:42 am)

An open letter to Broadway:

I am in my bed warming up after waiting in line for two hours in below 30 degree weather. In theory, this was an attempt to get rush tickets for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. In practice, it was an exercise in obtaining frostbite.

I understand that offering a limited number of inexpensive tickets to what would normally be a fairly expensive show seems like a way to make theater more accessible to those without much money. In reality, it makes theater more accessible to the people with the seemingly endless free time to camp out overnight in front of the Hirschfeld theater and snap up the tickets within the first 16 minutes.

So here's my suggestion - either lower ticket prices overall, which would surely make them more accessible to a broader range of the public or simply take advantage of the various ways that you have already set up to obtain tickets at a discounted rate. I would much rather need to print out a discount email and take it to the box office for a 40% off ticket that would guarantee that I would see a show, rather than wait for hours in the cold on the off chance that I might see it for cheap. I would even wait in line at TKTS, where at least if I don't get tickets to the show I want to see, I can usually get tickets to something else. But making cheap tickets the province of the crazy obsessed as opposed to the actual public is not actually helping your cause.

Yours,
a freezing theater lover