Queen of the Lion King
Either I'm the luckiest person in New York, or Lion King tickets aren't as hard to come by as legend has it. My college roommate was coming to town and she and her mom wanted to see the Lion King. But she heard it could take up to three years to get tickets.

Since I knew there was a trick to getting Producers tickets, I told Kerri I'd drop by the box office and see if a similar trick would work. So last Wednesday afternoon, I dropped by the box office and asked for Saturday or Sunday tickets. What do you know - two seats in the eleventh row on Saturday night. I bought them for the regular price of $100 a pop. I asked Mr. Box Office if there was a trick to getting those seats, knowing full well my husband had hoped to take my stepson sooner than that three-year mark. The guy in the ticket office said there is no pattern - they are seats held by Disney in case they need to give them to someone (the VIPs, I assume.) They release them at no specified time before the show, he said. He also told me I should go play the lottery given how charmed I was at that moment.

About 10 minutes later, I actually took out the tickets to have a look, and saw they were for Friday night at 8 p.m. - about an hour after my guests would arrive at their hotel if their airline and traffic cooperated. So Friday morning comes, and Kerri calls me from the San Jose airport to say their flight has been delayed and there's no way they'll make it to Lion King. No problem, my husband and stepson used those. But then I decided I might as well call Ticketmaster to see if more seats happened to open up. After about 15 minutes on hold, the operator came on and told me there were two seats open for Sunday evening - in the 10th row. I bought 'em. So if you're doing the calculation, on Wednesday afternoon, I got a pair of tickets for Friday night. On Friday afternoon, I got a pair of tickets for Sunday night.

Two other Broadway ticket items: We went to see The Producers a couple weeks ago (the tickets had literally yellowed since I purchased them in August) and there were two guys scalping tickets out front about five minutes before the curtain went up. … This past weekend, my friends bought front row tickets to Proof via the TKTS booth downtown on Saturday morning. The price was about $40 each.

And while I'm at it, might I just throw in my cheap review of Edward Albee's The Goat: It was baaaaaaaad.
- posted by Amy @ 5/14/2002 06:02:00 PM