Yes,” wrote Ben Brantley, “it really is that good.”
Tracking the price of a seat became a pastime in itself. Noting that the average face value for a ticket to the Broadway Hamilton is $189, another Times story reported: “For most of May [2016], the median price of a ticket on the secondary market was around $850. Between the Tonys and the July 9 performances, it pushed toward $1,600. Before Mr. Miranda’s announcement of his departure [from the show’s title role], ticket holders were offering a seat for the July 9 performance at an average of $2,700. With the news of his exit, the average asking price quickly climbed to $10,900 a seat.” You read that right too: $10,900.
As the box office numbers indicate, that’s a great consolation. We all get a role, both in the past and in the future, and what may look superficially like chaos is exposed as a movement toward freedom. A friend of mine—a gay white man from Arkansas—saw it and told me it made him “proud to be an American.”
