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Are theatre tickets too expensive?! | The reality behind the $921 tickets to Othello on Broadway
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Micky Jo
So I'll be honest, this sentence feels completely insane, but I'm about to say it anyway. Folks, is $1,000 too much to pay for a single ticket to the theatre? What the hell is going on? Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you, if you are listening on podcast platforms. My name is Micky Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre, just not when it costs the same as a house. I am of course exaggerating. No one, no one can afford a house. But it was reported this week that the new production of Othello, starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenh as Othello and Iago, had set a Broadway record, becoming the highest grossing play in history over a single week. But why could that be, I hear you ask. Is it because the production has become hugely culturally relevant? Is it because it's the best production of Othello anyone's ever seen? No, it hasn't opened and by extension been reviewed yet. I'll give you a clue. It's the two names that I mentioned in the little bit of explanation there. Celebrity casting has always driven ticket prices, but this time it has driven them as far as, let me get this right, $2,818,297 in just the second week of previews. Presumably that number could still climb and they could exceed their own record and put out another press release. That is, if they aren't deterred by the backlash that this is now receiving. Because guess what, this doesn't feel like a good thing. Because on the one hand, yay, Shakespeare. And also, I really hope that West End actress Molly Osbourne, who is starring alongside these two Hollywood heavyweights as Desdemona when the production deliberately went looking for undiscovered Tal, and apparently she submitted an extraordinary self tape. I hope that she's being paid really well. And yay for the business of Broadway and yay for investors feeling encouraged. And yay for producers being able to take that money and put it into other shows that aren't star led. But also, are there any shows that aren't star led at this point? There is so much for us to discuss. I feel like I haven't ever fully waded into this discourse, but we're going to do it today. We are going to talk about theatre ticket prices. This clearly is too much. But what is too much? Where should that ceiling be? And under what circumstances is it acceptable to charge an extraordinary amount of money, if ever? I have many feelings about this and I'm sure that you do as well as always. Make sure to share your thoughts and feelings in the comments section down below. Weigh in on this hot topic can you believe these ticket prices? Are you one of the lucky people who managed to get a ticket before they became as ludicrously expensive? And what do you think about top prices? If you enjoy this conversation and want to know what I think about other theatrical topics, make sure that you are subscribed right here on YouTube with the notifications turned on so that YouTube lets you know every time I release a new video, including many theatre reviews, vlogs of my theatre trips and more news recaps and discussion moments. Or make sure you're following me on podcast platforms so you can hear the sound of my voice as I lose my mind talking about 2 million, 2.8 million. I can't. Let's just get into it. How the hell is a ticket to the theater nearly a thousand dol so this has been reported on with varying levels of support from a few different outlets. One that is definitely not encouraging about this is Johnny Oksinski for the New York Post, who allegedly has been disinvited from one of the show's press performances over his coverage of these rising ticket prices. In an article published on 8th March 2025, Johnny pointed out that Othello was the week's highest grossing show on Broadway, putting it above Wicked, the Lion K and Hamilton, which often take that top spot. The production sold a mammoth $2.63 million in tickets last week over just seven performances. This is now old news because that's now been updated, and he shares that a Shakespeare play taking over a million more than Hamilton than this huge juggernaut is not a victory for the classics. It's a war on your wallet, as he puts it. One of the more egregious details here is that people are paying as much as $921. That's just $79 less than a thousand to sit as far back as and I can't even get into the headspace where I can rationalize spending $921 on a single ticket transaction. That presumably, is for people who are really, really eager to see this. I mean, if you were eager, you'd have got tickets earlier. That, at this point, I guess, is for people who have that kind of money to throw at something. People who are really extraordinarily wealthy. But I can't imagine spending that much and then being in any m being in row M. You can see the overhang from M. Give me H on the aisle. Give me front row. Let Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal spit into my face. I'm not actually out looking for that, but I feel like I expect it for nearly $1,000 and you should as well. 921 is wild and I keep saying, like booking earlier versus booking later. Because this is the thing. If you take nothing else away from this video, this is the thing. I think we all need to remember a lot of times when these statistics are brought up and people say, go and look at these ticket prices right now for this sold out product. This happened just the other day on social media with the Seagull at the Barbican, which I recently reviewed on here. If you want to know what I thought about it. It was kind of a wild production, honestly, but very thought provoking. People said you can't get tickets to that for less than £350. That is because it is essentially sold out and the last few remaining tickets get priced up via dynamic pricing or the only ones released are these premium ticket packages. And so it looks at that point like the cheapest ticket available is 350 pounds, when in reality there were many Che tickets available when the thing went on sale. More often than not, when people are using these examples and people are taking screenshots, it's after the fact. It's after the show has mostly sold out and the last few available tickets are very expensive. It's a different conversation when productions first reveal their prices at the time of going on sale. That is something more interesting for us to talk about because just looking at the premium prices is not indicative of the affordability of the show in the first place. Take Much Ado About Nothing at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, which also drew criticism I think for somewhere in the region of like £250 tickets, maybe more. Another Hollywood star led Shakespeare, interestingly enough, with Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell. Again, I reviewed it here. You can go see what I thought. But key to remember here is that shortly after that production went on sale, it being a Jamie Lloyd Company production, they released thousands of tickets for an affordable fee. I think they were £30 for people under 30 for key workers, for those receiving government benefits. There was a significant quantity earmarked for those individuals, as there has been in every Jamie Lloyd production in Romeo and Jude Juliet with Tom Holland in Sunset Boulevard, or there has been in the uk at least. I can't remember if Sunset ever actually did that in New York. But then New York has other Ticketing policies, the likes of Rush tickets, where if you queue up on the day at the box office, the box office will at their discretion sell a certain number of tickets for a very reduced rate. You don't necessarily get to pick where you sit. They're not always premium or ideal seats, but sometimes it's front row for $35 or $25, although we have been seeing a little bit of inflation there as well. The problem with like Othello is that when you get really successful shows, they don't necessarily buy into all of these policies. They don't necessarily do Rush, they don't necessarily do under 30 or under 35 tickets like a lot of the plays do. Like the Manhattan Theater Club do, like Lincoln Center, I think have link ticks like the Roundabout Theater Company do as of right now. And I'm looking on bwayrush.com which consolidates all of the different Rush and lottery and digital lottery ticketing options here. The only thing being offered by Othello, your only hope of Getting tickets is a 49 digital lottery. And who is to say how many tickets they're even making available to that? So let's do a little bit of digging then to have a more authentic conversation about the Othello ticket prices specifically. This is a Reddit post from 6 months ago ranging from $135 to 921 that top price. This was for a random Friday performance in April. You had $176 for the last row mes 135, that cheapest ticket would put you in the rear two rows of the mezzanine. Also on the sides up to 216 dol front of the rear mezzanine, not even the front section of the mezzanine. If you want to be in the front row of the front mezzanine, which is the dress circle to anyone watching from the UK that is $621 or it was before they all sold the last row of the orchestra, $421. Row D of the orchestra, $621 and then those 921 in prime position as well. Interesting. This is what makes me really frustrated with all of this is it starts to make you a little bit crazy because you're like, okay, where are those $135 tickets? And then you said and a production like this whose tickets range between 135 and 921 makes you feel as though 135 is a reasonable number. And I think it is for a really good quality of seat I think it is if it's one of the upper price bands. Here is the controversial thing about me. I will defend premium ticket pricing under certain conditions because I respect and defend the right of producers to, you know, have a commercial endeavour and want to make money back for their investors to keep people investing in the theater to show that it can be commercially viable, lucrative even. What you have to realize is that a lot of these investors, all of these investors really are doing this because they love the theatre. There are smarter and easier and bigger ways to make money than investing in the theater. They just don't necessarily give you the same artistic and creative fulfillment. And we need people to invest in the theater. We need investors, we need producers, we need audience members who are going to buy those premium tickets. So I mentioned I would defend them under certain circ examples like the Jamie Lloyd Company where we can see that price offsetting a lot of earmarked cheaper tickets for people on low income, for people on government benefits, for key workers, for young people. I'm very passionate about getting young people into the theatre. I have been very angry in the past with theatres who have discontinued their young person's ticket allocation policy and turned it into cheap previews for the fastest people to buy tickets. That is not doing anything to curate the audience of tomorrow. That is only making people more enthusiastic at your first few performances because they only paid 10 pounds to be there and they're going to nice things about it on the Internet. It's marketing and I hate it. But I'm not oblivious to the fact that Broadway has become really expensive. And we'll talk about this more in a moment. And I'm not suggesting that everyone is just charging these prices at their whimsy. But I find it really difficult to defend when something is that wildly expensive and you're charging three figures for what's probably restricted view where especially for a Shakespeare play, it's not the Lion King, then it's not a giraffe on the stage. It's not this huge spectacle to see the intensity of Denzel Washington coming to terms with this big character transformation. You want to see the duplicitousness of Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago, or you don't care about seeing him, in which case you don't have to spend the money. But it feels wild to me to be spending that amount of money, to be that far away, to be in the worst seats objectively in the theater. And like Johnny was saying in the New York Post, $921 for Row M. That's. That's just extraordinary. And I think there's a danger that comes with it as well. Not just because every time a new ceiling is reached, it makes it seem acceptable for everything else to float up to that level. Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal aren't the most famous people on the earth. There will be another show with big stars. There are other shows with big stars right now that will be looking sideways at this and saying, are they, did they sell that? Are people paying that? Can we charge that now as well? Can everything. This rising tide is going to carry all of these boats to insane amounts of money. But also there's a danger, I think, in breeding entitlement among audience members. If you're there on a date night, just two people, there could be more, but let's say just two people and between you, maybe one of you has paid for both tickets and you've spent eighteen hundred dollars on an evening at the theatre for a Shakespeare play, you're gonna really, really want it to be good. For one thing. I mean, you can pat yourselves on the back for seeing Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal. People will be really mad if they're out for any performances if they've spotted spent that much money. If we spent four figures on two tickets, nearly $2,000. But also if someone whispers something behind you. I don't know, I feel like I envision rage happening here because you're going to want a perfect theatrical experience for eighteen hundred dollars. If someone is disruptive near you. If someone comes in late and asks you to stand up, you're not going to be happy about it. I feel like it creates a sense of entitlement where people are saying, I've spent this much for this, I better have a perfect. I almost get it. I don't like to see entitlement in audience members, but when you're charging them that much, it takes away your leg to stand on. When you say that they shouldn't be behaving that way, do you know what I mean? It feels like it's just becoming a lose, lose situation for everybody. That's before we get to the stage door of it all. Because you know there are going to be conversations about someone wanting to see Denzel and the fact that they've spent nearly a thousand dollars. Try explaining to that person that their ticket price does not include a post show meet and greet. Because if I'm that person standing on the street, while I respect that, that is the truth and I'M a stau defender of the fact that no one is entitled to a stage door interaction. After these actors have finished doing their job and are just trying to leave their workplace. If you're telling them that that ticket price didn't entitle them to the stage door moment, then you enter into a conversation where it feels like you almost need to itemize exactly what they paid for with $921 and why it's worth it, why it's so much more worth it than the show across the street that maybe got better reviews than the critics pick around the corner, than the award winner over there, that charging a fraction of that. Although unfortunately, all of these prices are heading up in this same direction and we need only look back to history to see how true that is. Interestingly enough, and this is going back 25 years, but Mr. Oleksinski pointed out that the producers caused a little bit of controversy when they became, I guess, I think the first Broadway show to increase ticket prices as high as $100, which now again, we're made to think is like the cheapest option. I remember being a teenager going to see shows in the West End. I would sit in that back row. I would sit in that corner. I would sit in that worst seat in the theater because I worked three and a half hours on a Saturday morning in a library and I made like £30 a week so I could spend. It would have been like 15 pounds, sometimes 10 pounds. It went slowly up to 25, then 30, then you had shows coming in. The Hamilton may have been one of the first ones where I think that lowest price band was something like £39.50. Although don't quote me on that. We are seeing shows now where the cheapest tickets live somewhere around that 40, 45 pound range. Gone are the days that te teenage me would have been able to get a seat in the last row and Mickey Jo Theatre would never have happened. Where are the theatre enthusiasts of tomorrow? What are today's teenagers doing while they're trying to get Rush tickets on the Today Ticks app, which not every show is offering. And that's only if they live close enough to London to be able to get tickets on the day. We have to consider that a lot of people are traveling from further afield and they don't have that luxury. They have to plan things in advance, which means they're also paying for a hotel, paying for travel. Guess what? Travel's getting more expensive. Hotels are getting more expensive, both in London and in New York. Prices are Insane cost of living is extraordinary. No one can afford eggs in the United States of America. What is going on? And Othello is not the only one. They are just right now at the top of this pyramid. But I mentioned there are other star led Broadway shows, particularly in plays. At the moment you have Kieran Culkin and Bob Odenkirk and Bilber in an upcoming production of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. I say upcoming. I believe it's already in previews. That will also cost you hundreds of dollars for the best seats in the house. Kieran's succession co star Sarah Snook is in a one actor production of the Picture of Dorian Gray surrounded on stage by brilliant stage management team and crew helping to facilitate this very impressive production where Sarah plays every character in Oscar Wilde's the Picture of Dorian Gray. The fact that the cast is smaller does not seem to have had an impact on ticket prices. It's still very expensive down at the Music Box Theatre. Netflix star Sadie Sink is about to be in John Proctor as the villain. George Clooney has co written and is starring in making his Broadway debut in Good Night and Good Luck tickets very, very expensive for that one as well. And it is that celebrity led thing. Is it a symptom of the fact that these Hollywood stars are taking really big salaries and that has to be written into the production budget so to break even in a limited Broadway run they have to charge more or is it to do with the fact that these producers are seeing that the demand is there and they can more because they have this celebrity. It's George Clooney's Broadway debut. You get to be in the same room as George Clooney acting on stage. Who can say they've done that? He's not done a lot of theater in his career. He's a movie star. So there's a novelty to that and people will pay for that experience regardless of if the play is good, which is music to a producer and an investor's ears. But I alluded to the idea of a production budget there and that's also something that we have to talk about especially for the Broadway play because for a musical, although they're generally more expensive to produce. Think about all of the musicians, think about generally larger casts. If you you have all of these brilliant, talented dancers, think about more sets, more costumes, everything. The teams backstage, for the most part they are going to be bigger undertakings than most plays except for the likes of like Stranger Things and the First Shadow which is this huge play that does all of these elaborate things. But musicals also have many more opportunities to make money than these plays. For one thing, they run longer. Generally speaking, you get limited run musicals and you get musicals that don't sell particularly well and have to close down very quickly because they're very expensive week on week. But a lot of them run for much longer than these limited run plays. They also produce cast recordings which go on to make money ongoingly. They also are able to tour more easily than plays. We don't see a lot of these plays touring. A lot of shows that don't necessarily recoup on Broadway as musicals, then subsequently recoup later in life, if not touring, like Beautiful Noise, the Neil diamond musical, just announced that they recouped their initial investment with the show's North American tour, then later down the road with licensing. The Broadway play kind of has to make all of their money back within that time period. And something else that we keep hearing and that we keep seeing and that we are seeing in ticket prices is that it is becoming more and more expensive to produce shows on Broadway. There are a lot of financial technicalities going into this, but that is having a clear impact when it comes to ticket prices. And it's not just Broadway. I mentioned Much Ado About Nothing over here in the West End and the Cate Blanchett and Emma Corrin led production of the Seagull. What all of these seem to have in common is the presence of celebrity. That seems to be the thing that people will fork out money for, but also either it's people who can easily afford it or it's people who are saving and who are, you know, justifying it by saying, well, that's the one time we'll go to the theatre this month or this year or for the next couple of years potentially, just to see Cate Blanchett on stage because she's fabulous and talented and she is, and she's wonderful in it. But what happens happens when you're a huge fan of a celebrity and you go and see a bold production of a play that they are in and then they disappoint you. Sigourney Weaver's performance in the Tempest. Not to keep going on about it, but it was not reviewed well by myself or many other reviewers who went in to see it. Similarly, the Jamie Lloyd production of Romeo and Juliet starring Tom Holland and Francesca Amawooda Rivers. I've joked before that the thing that you'll hear a British audience member say when they've spent a lot of Money. And they don't want to feel as though they've made made a regrettable decision. The thing you'll hear them say is, well, I'm glad that I saw it, but really they'd be more glad to have kept the few hundreds of pounds. I was so desperate to see that production that even though I had a ticket that I'd bought later in the run, I got a last minute return for a performance just before press night. You don't get to decide where those last minute returns pop up. I believe I spent £350 seeing Romeo and Juliet. And I had a lovely VIP experience. I got a little box with a little cheese board in. I got a little VIP room they take you to and from your seats. There's a little private toilet there. All of the stuff you have to stress about, usually in a theater you didn't have to think about. There were multiple glasses of Prosecco, if not champagne. There was a little ice cream tub, there was a program included. If you itemized everything, it was definitely worth the jump from the tier below, which I think might have been 300, but not doing the VIP add on. Like it was definitely £50 worth of stuff if you added all of that together. But it's still a lot to spend on a production that I really ended up hating. For me, it wasn't that much of a problem because I knew that the review would do pretty well. So thank you everyone, I guess, for watching that one. But it was still a difficult decision. And that's only an amount of money I've spent on tickets a handful of times. More often it happens on Broadway, I think, to see Funny Girl with Lea Michele, I spent a three figure amount of money. To see Merrily We Roll Along, I spent a three figure amount of money and that was still to buy house seats. That was not paying fees through different ticket sellers. That was still going through the production and having the opportunity to buy tickets at this special discounted rate and get some of the best seats in the house. It was still, I believe, more than $200 in both instances, which is not money that I can afford to throw at every theatrical transaction. It's not money I can afford to spend seeing a piece of theatre once a month. Even I don't think I could afford to do that consistently. But it's a decision I felt I was able to make for that specific show if it was the difference between seeing it and not. Another problem with all of this is if people are scraping together money, they would be spending on multiple Theater trips to just, just see that one show this year. And that's how they justify the price. Because they really want to see that celebrity. They really want to see Andrew Scott or Jonathan Bailey or whoever it is, then the other shows that they would otherwise have seen are going to be the ones who struggle and suffer. And guess which shows those are. Those are the shows that don't have celebrities in. Which is why everything moves towards this type of casting. Because it seems like it's no longer enough for a show to have name recognition. It's like, oh, Evita's coming, coming back. We all know Evita. My parents generation knows Evita because they used to play those songs on the radio, because it was a concept album alongside being launched as a show. But now it's this element of the conversation. And maybe this has been going on a little while longer than I give it credit for, but it seems as though it's now, okay, we know that show, we know what that is, but who's starring in it? And everyone's entitled to say that. And I think it's reasonable to wait to find out who's going to be leading the production before you buy tickets. But it seems like just name recognition and familiarity with a show is not enough anymore. You need to have some kind of a celebrity in the cast. And not every celebrity was made equal. It's interesting the people who sell tickets and the people who don't. I guess the final thing for us to talk about then is to answer that question I asked at the beginning. Do we agree that $921 is far too much for a single ticket to a Broadway play? And if so, what is the appropriate ceiling? What do we think the top, top price premium t ought to be? Ought it be consistent across every production or ought to be proportional to how much you are getting? If a show that has more sets, has more cast members, is longer, is a two act show rather than a one act show, should that be twice as expensive? People have said this before with six now six. When it first came to the West End, the prices were not expensive by any stretch of the imagination, certainly not by today's standard. But people were saying, well, it's a 75 minute show, so if you really think about it, you're paying this much much per minute. Whereas with something like Hamilton it's longer, so it's more worth it. That's one of many sort of strange justifications and equivalencies that people have talked about in trying to wrap their heads around ticket pricing. But the reality of the thing is also that for the majority of these shows, we're talking about not all of them, but for the majority it is a commercial endeavour. There are a handful of publicly funded theatrical institutions here in the uk, because of the Arts Council, and with the National Theatre being the most obvious example of, of that, that have a responsibility, an obligation to provide affordable and accessible ticketing to those who need it. To young people particularly, it is vital that we make sure there is a next generation of audiences who is going to sustain theatre. It seems like no one's really thinking of future proofing this industry, as all of these tickets get more expensive and we are pricing out that next generation, that's a big concern, but also for every other person in society, even if they're over 30, even if they're over 35, whatever the cutoff is, who has the right to see theatre and to gain that cultural enrichment. Now, here is the tricky thing I will defend to the ground the right of the human being to see theatre. You know, I love theatre like nothing else in this world. You know how important I think it is? When I got that job at 16, when I was making £30 a week working three and a half hours at a library, I did it because I didn't feel as though it would be right to ask my parents to pay for as many theatre tickets as I wanted, which was at the time like approximately one a week, which, and we may not all feel that way, but for the average person, is an extraordinary amount of theatre to see. There are a lot of people who don't go to the theatre, who go to the theatre once a month or who go to the theatre once or twice a year. And the difficult thing is, while I will assert the importance of affordability in theatre and accessibility in theatre, especially for young audiences, I also support it being a commercial endeavor. And a producer like Sonia Friedman, for example, who is, if you don't know, the producer behind many of Broadway's most successful plays, behind Stereophonic, behind the Hills Of California, I mean, many more. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child being one of her biggest, she, I have heard, has this policy where if investors want to invest and back her biggest shows, they also have to support the smaller ones. Sometimes it can literally work like that, or sometimes it's as simple as this producer makes a load of money touring this show every year, that charges a lot, but always does well, and with that, they can justify a few shows that aren't going to turn a profit, that aren't going to recoup their investment. But everything gets balanced out within that same ecosystem. You have ticket prices. We see this in shows in individual pricing structures where you have really expensive tickets justifying them making thousands of available for £30 for £25, having more rush tickets. We see a balance and it becomes more about like, how does that balance skew versus oh my God, can you believe that their top price is 300 pounds. Who is paying that? Guess what? Some people are paying that because Othello is selling out and setting records. People are paying these huge amounts of money, even if it's not conceivable to us. But it's also on a show by show basis. Some shows, as we see, as we see with this, are more expensive, expensive than others. Sometimes you have something like Operation Mincemeat, which has a baffling pricing approach in the West End, which is another conversation for another day. Don't even get me started. But something like Cabaret is consistently offering this luxury premium theatrical experience, has renovated their theater so that damn near every seat in that auditorium has a pretty good view. Some of them are this luxury cabaret table experience. You have the pre show immersive elements. The casting is always like A or B list, celebrity casting pretty consistently and you know, they always bring in really exciting talent. Does that show thereby have a right to charge more for tickets because it's offering something more luxurious, something a little more guaranteed? If we look at the world of restaurants, we accept immediately that some restaurants are more expensive than others. It doesn't mean that the most expensive restaurants are going to give you the best meals of your life. It just means they're going to be fancier, premium offerings. You can say the same thing about hotels. There are some hotels which are much more expensive than others. When you travel, there are parts of the world that are inherently more expensive for you to get to. Now, does a human being have a right to see theatre? Yes. Does a human being have an inherent right to be able to afford to see every single piece of theatre they may want to? That is where it gets tricky. Do we have a right to travel the world? Yes, I think we do. I think that's so important that our movements around the globe be as unrestricted as possible as human beings. This could get very politically complicated. But what I mean is, why are we more up in arms about the fact that someone can't afford a ticket to every single new show? If something very star led, if something very limited and very fancy is opening and charging a lot for tickets, why are we outraged that someone can't get a £25 ticket to go and see that in a great seat weeks after it's already started selling out. Why are we more outraged about about that than the fact that you literally just can't afford to fly to certain places or to visit certain places or even to travel beyond the country that you live in? For some people, that's not a financial reality. There are restaurants you can't afford to eat at. What do you do you eat at the ones you can afford to eat at? There are hotels you can't afford to stay at, so you'd stay at different ones. But when it comes to theater, I don't necessarily think that we look at it that way and we have to be realistic about it being a business. I know this sucks, and I say this as someone who wants to go and see all of the shows all of the time, which is why occasionally I do find myself spending a lot of money on tickets. And I also, and I'm going to acknowledge this here before someone tells me in the comments, speak from a position of immense privilege as someone who very often has the opportunity to see shows with press tickets which I don't have to pay for, that having become a reality of this thing that I'm doing right now, it wouldn't be sustainable for me to do it with the frequency that I do if that wasn't available to me. But simply put, in the current financial landscape, it is not possible for any show you want to see any night of the week to have a 25 pound ticket available to you last minute whenever you want it. That means a show is not selling well. That means the show is selling horribly right now. And there is also, and this is why I'd love to get people's feedback in the comments of this video, a big disconnect between what British audiences consider to be expensive and what American audiences consider to be expensive. Because what we consider call an insane bottom price, like 45 pounds. If a show opens in the West End and their cheapest ticket is 45 pounds, people will say they have no affordable tickets. And that's terrible. That is less than the Rush tickets that people will line up on the street in horrible weather to get in New York. And when it comes to money, we are all going to have a different perspective on it. Everyone's going to have their own interpretation of what they are willing to pay. I think think in a starry production, in a great production, for a great show, I think a $250 premium package is not unreasonable. I think that is maybe where I would kind of like to see a ceiling. But if you'd asked me a few years ago, I think I would have said that that number was insane. The fact that we're talking now with Othello about something that is almost quadruple, that is mind boggling. And maybe I didn't necessarily say everything that you were hoping I would in this. And maybe you don't agree with all of my thoughts about ticketing and the rights of producers to sell tickets for a price that is going to recoup their investment, that is going to keep them in business. But if we just demand that everything be completely affordable all of the time, then the theatre industry is not going to be able to survive. We have to acknowledge that this is a commercial endeavour. At the same time, there has to be a balance, which is why something like the Jamie Lloyd Company policy is so brilliant. Which is why I celebrate every single very venue who has a ticket allocation for young people. Which is why rush policies and lotteries, though not ideal, are still important and brilliant and worth celebrating. It ought not to be this difficult to gain access to affordable tickets. Unfortunately it is. What we're not going to do is celebrate the top prices rising to an almost four figure sum that makes it feel like the day isn't far away away when it's more than four figures and in fact upwards of four figure tickets have been sold. I think Hamilton in some of its most successful early days may even have been selling tickets directly from the box office for more than a thousand. Certainly when you buy them third party from reselling sites, easily they would have exceeded that. And I will be hugely intrigued to see what the reviews are like for Othello because for it to be setting all these records, for it to be as expensive as it is, it had better be really darn good. Will the order audiences care? Will they be happy enough to have seen these actors on stage? Are these huge Shakespeare fans? Will they know the difference between good and bad Shakespeare? Are they just there to see Jake and Denzel? All of these questions and more will be answered ongoingly here on Mickey Jo Theatre to stay up to date with all of the latest Broadway and West End news as well as the reviews of the shows that I have seen. Make sure you are following me on podcast platforms or subscribed right here on YouTube. As always, let me know your opinions in the comments section down below. I know British people if you're watching. We don't normally like to talk about money. Let's try to avoid anything going to a contentious place For a lot of people. These are really personal conversations when it comes to finances. But I also think it would be really interesting because I do get asked by people, who are these people who are spending £250 on tickets? Guess what? There are people spending 900 on Broadway. Thank you for listening to this. I hope that you've enjoyed and I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a Stagey Day. For 10 more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo the oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.