I Won the Hamilton Ticket Lottery (and You Can Too)

Theatre tickets don’t have to cost a fortune. You can get tickets for Hamilton and other top Broadway shows for a fraction of the price!

For many months over the past year or more, I’ve religiously entered the online lottery for a chance to see Hamilton on Broadway.

As you probably know, tickets for some shows, especially Hamilton, are outrageously expensive, and I never saw a reason to spend such exorbitant amounts. In fact, I’ve seen so many excerpts of the production on television that I almost began to wonder if I still wanted to see the show. But not quite.

I’m a pretty lucky person, and it doesn’t hurt to know the ways to increase your odds of obtaining the best (show, meal, item, hotel, flight…. etc) for the least amount of money! After all, my motto is Affordable Luxury!

I entered the Hamilton Lottery (and previous renditions of the lottery) online or through the Hamilton App (available for both IOS and Android) religiously. If you win, you get to buy two tickets at $10 apiece, because Alexander Hamilton is on the face of $10 bills. ($10 tickets is amazing considering my friends are buying [or scalping selling] tickets at prices 50 times that!). The Hamilton lottery is available Chicago and Los Angeles too.

I also got Dave into entering the Hamilton lottery daily, and yesterday he called me and said, I think we just won Hamilton tickets.

OHMYGOD! REALLY?

A few years ago, I won tickets to see the hugely popular show, Book of Mormon.  Actually, I won the right to buy two tickets to the next day’s show for $32 per ticket – – the Book of Mormon had a daily Twitter Lottery, where you simply retweet the Book of Mormon‘s lottery tweet, and those chosen have the right to purchase 2 tickets to the next day’s performance.  The seats were far from nose-bleed territory – in fact they were front row center (normally priced at $252 apiece).

In my experience, the two best ways to get Broadway tickets at a bargain are Broadway Rush Tickets and Broadway Lottery Tickets. A good place to begin is with NY TIX, which lists the shows that participate in Rushes and Lotteries, and the time the Lottery and/or Rush is held.  Of course, the amount of tickets available varies from show to show and day-to-day.

Rush tickets are usually given out to those who wait on line, and sold first come, first served.  Availability depends on the popularity of the show as well as the day of the week, among other factors. A few years ago, I was able to get standing room tickets to see Fish in the Dark, starring Larry David for Dave’s birthday (he’s a huge Curb Your Enthusiasm fan) by waiting on line at 9 am at the box office.

Lotteries, on the other hand are held at a specific time each day and the box office begins taking names for the lottery at a given time before the drawing.  It is luck of the draw, as they say….

Some people have also had success with a website and app called TodayTix, which lists last minute ticket prices for a number of cities.

But anyway EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK, I’m going to see Hamilton tonight!!