If you want a snowball’s hope in Hell of viewing Lin-Manuel Miranda’s last performance as Alexander Hamilton on July 9 without paying exorbitant ticket prices, you’ll have to try your hand at the Hamilton lottery.
The Hamilton official lottery page states that “21 front row tickets will be sold to winners of the Official Digital Lottery,” which you can enter online here. “After the lottery closes, you will be notified via email within minutes as to whether you won or not… If you are selected as a winner, you have 60 minutes to pay for your tickets. Seats are assigned at the discretion of the Box Office and cannot be transferred to other people or performances.”
There’s also the live #Ham4Ham lottery, for which you’ll need to go to the theater and stand in line alongside thousands of other hopefuls. Playbill states standing-room tickets go for $40 with no guarantee any will be available, along with a very slight chance the box office may have a few seats at face value due to returns or cancellations. If there’s one thing a line-sitter will tell you, though, it’s that nothing’s guaranteed .
Miranda’s a busy man with a lot to get on with after Hamilton: he’s written music for the Disney animated musical Moana, he’s working on a film adaptation of In the Heights and he’s set to co-star with Emily Blunt in Disney’s upcoming Mary Poppins Returns. He’s also wrangling to set up Hamilton touring productions and considering a new musical, according to sources close to him. He’ll be succeeded in the role of Alexander Hamilton by his understudy, Javier Muñoz.
Hamilton is sold out through January 2017 and the only tickets available now are through a fraught secondary market filled with scalpers, counterfeiters and other opportunists. Stubhub prices for rear mezzanine (the seats furthest from the stage) start at $1100, while seats in the orchestra section (closer to the stage) are running up to $12,000 per ticket.
Compare this to the $500 it cost me, including Ticketmaster’s abusive fees, for two front orchestra tickets to a January 2016 showing -- purchased months in advance, in September 2015 -- for an idea of how wild these prices are.
Best of luck with the lottery for all the hopefuls wishing to see Miranda’s last performance in the iconic role of Hamilton. Or, you know, thousands of dollars in your wallet. Whichever works.
