The Golden Ticket

Yesterday I managed to pick up half price tickets to see Les Miserables. Although there was no mad rush to pick up the tickets, there was a tube strike. Combined with the repeated showers that sent me scurrying off my bike desperately seeking shelter, it did make the process less than super smooth. But where would the fun be if it were easy?

I got five seats together in the stalls about 13 rows back. At midday there were clearly plenty of seats going. Yet by 7.30pm the theatre was packed; I couldn't see a spare seat in the stalls. So when did all those people get their tickets? They didn't all look like the sort of people who would risk spoiling their night out by not booking up early enough in advance (I know this because I - who am just this sort of person - was wearing shorts; no one else was). And did I mention there was a tube strike? Yet just that afternoon there had been enough seats to give me 5 reasonably priced tickets at a solid 40% discount. So either they had all turned up on the door to buy tickets (to be fair, there was a queue when I arrived at the theatre) or the mechanics of selling tickets are far more complicated than might be initially expected.

I do surprisingly have some experience of this. Here's a short extract from a contract I signed for a student play I produced last summer:

"the Manager may sell tickets through ticket agents or other booking organisations subject to the allowing of credit and the sale of commission discounts and maximum booking fees and any seat allocations being determined by the Manager at his sole discretion PROVIDED THAT no agency deal or guarantee for the Play during the Engagement Period shall be proposed without prior consultation between the Producer and the Manager and any such deal or guarantee shall only be valid if the Producer and the Manager shall have mutually agreed terms and shall have jointly signed any such agreement and it is understood that the Manager has a prior arrangement with Ticketmaster exclusively between the hours of 9pm to 9am Monday to Saturday and from 6pm on Sundays."

It's even more confusing if you read it really quickly in one breath. So even with ticketmaster seemingly opening their arms to transparency it's not entirely clear. Seems I still do have lots to learn about how to sell seats.

But it's not just seats that need to be sold: the Arcola Theatre's Pieces of Vincent has cushions on the floor, and the playing space surrounds the audience - very cool to be surrounded by both video projections and live actors on all sides. Harder to tell who got the best seat though...