NEW YORK (AP) – Alexander Hamilton’s face proudly adorns the $10 bill. But it’s hard to imagine the founding father and treasury secretary, with all his famous ambition, ever anticipating just how many of those bills people would delightedly fork over one day to see a musical about his life.
With Lin-Manuel Miranda’s red-hot, rap-and hip-hop infused “Hamilton” set to end its off-Broadway run this weekend, some theatergoers have been paying well over 10 times the $120 ticket price for the privilege of seeing it before it reaches Broadway this summer. And fans with lower budgets have been waiting for hours on end in the Public Theater lobby to score a prized $20 lottery ticket or an even rarer standby ticket.
All this despite the announcement on Feb. 24 that the show was moving to Broadway in July for an open-ended run. That, it turns out, only increased demand for tickets off-Broadway. People, it seems, wanted to see it in the original “room where it happens,” to quote a song from the show sung by Hamilton nemesis Aaron Burr.
“People want to be able to say, ‘Oh, I already saw that downtown,'” quips Peter Breger, president of the Off-Broadway Alliance and a longtime producer and entertainment attorney.
Art historian Mary Emma Harris, 71, arrived at the Public a little before 6 a.m. Wednesday to try for a standby ticket. “I was determined to see it before the Broadway move,” she says. She calculated that being first in line for one of a couple of standby tickets gave her better odds than the in-person lottery, which draws hundreds of people daily for an undetermined number of seats (There’s also a virtual lottery, for only two seats per performance.)