broadway tickets are actually a bargain.
The first producer I worked for switched shows in his subscription season. A thrifty chap, he dispatched me to a dark corner of the Sydney Opera House box office, to cross out the old show, and write "What the Butler Saw" on 18,000 tickets. Computers may have changed things, but one thing didn’t change – tickets will always be too expensive.
Pricing issues are getting an unusual amount of media attention this week. Firstly, it was reported that the Federal Reserve had weighed in on Hannah Montanna ticket prices. God knows how a Fed economist got involved, but parents were in a flap about the scalpers. The economist said it was simply supply and demand. The cheap tickets (aimed at families) merely exacerbated things, and the scalpers matched supply to demand.
Of course, the secondary ticket market is just getting bigger and more legitimate. This week Stub Hub, already a huge online ticket reseller, opened a storefront in Times Square. Ticketmaster is getting in to the resale business too. (Coincidentally, TM is such a money machine that Barry Diller is now spinning it off, to be a separately listed stock.)
The Fed economist was right about supply and demand, but the media loves to scream about Broadway prices. (The furor about Young Frankenstein seems to re-ignite each week.) This is not gouging. As the cliché says, producers aren’t mass producing their shows; unlike a film, the event is created live each night and costs pretty much the same in the third year as it did in the first year.
Gordon Cox gets the story right in Weekly Variety’s headline theatre story. Although leading with news that Broadway plays have crossed the $100 barrier (up from around $65 in 2000), he shows that the average prices are actually down slightly. The internet makes a vast array of discounts possible – theatres don’t have the variable pricing software of airlines and hotels, but these services do a good job of matching supply (discounts for slower shows) and demand (expensive last minute tickets for sold out shows).