On Tuesday, and for the next month, it’s almost impossible to see Julia Louis Dreyfus in her Broadway debut.
The Hudson Theater is sold out but for a few tickets. And those ducats range up to over $800 at the box office. The cheap seats are 600 clams.
The play is a revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s “Other Desert Cities,” which co-stars Allison Janney and Ed Harris.
Right through the middle to end of November, forget about it. It’s like every “Seinfeld” and “Veep” front loaded the sale.
But then we get to Thanksgiving, and suddenly the seat map for regularly priced tickets on the website — not StubHub or another broker — become plentiful.
Since there were no press seats offered, I was thinking I might go to the matinee on Friday. So I checked it out, and voila! there are plenty of choices at all prices. If I want to sit in the way back of the dreadful Hudson, it will cost $258.
But then I wondered, is that because it’s a holiday and everyone’s out of town? Or this availability continue? And to my surprise, it does — all the way through January.
So maybe the diehard fans were just enough to fill up about a month’s worth of tickets. And then? For five, six, seven hundred dollars, the next tier of theatergoers seems to be waiting for reviews. It turns out, that’s a lot of money even for the well-heeled. Everyone has a lot of shopping to do in December. Outrageously priced theater tickets may not be in the budget.
So we’ll wait til tonight around 10pm to see what reviews do come in, and if they catalyze the box office tomorrow. If everything sells out, I’ll just have the memory of Stockard Channing and Judith Light, and Stockard Channing and Linda Lavin in the off-Broadway production. And that will be just fine.
