An Installment Plan for Theater Tickets: An Idea Whose Time Has Come or a WTF? What Do You Think?

Drew Humphrey in the Chicago production of “42nd Street” at Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre

By Marilyn Lester****This week, it was announced that Ticketmaster would institute an installment plan to pay for Broadway tickets for Hamilton (top ticket at a whopping $1,551, fees included) and a dozen other shows. For Hamilton, the monthly pay-down is $138, not an insignificant sum in itself.

This news should be a mic drop, especially for those who remember a different world of Broadway theater, one that didn’t require a mortgage to participate in. True, the price of Broadway has been on the rise for a long time, but how did it come to this? Six years ago, in 2012, Derek Thompson, writing in The Atlantic and noting how the top ticket for Broadway had climbed to $600, blamed the 1%. Explaining, he said: “But perhaps the key factor is that prices rise as long as people will pay them, and if the 1% is willing to pay $400, $500, and $600 for one night’s entertainment, average prices will continue to rise as producers experiment with ways to price dynamically and take advantage of rich folks’ love of the theater… If rich people want to pay $600 for one night at the theater, who are producers to try and stop them?”

A New York Times article in 2003 noted that “In the 1980s and 90s, producers sharply raised prices and eliminated much of the price variation within a given theater. In the last 50 years, the top ticket price for a Broadway musical has more than doubled, even after being adjusted for inflation.”

For more perspective, here are examples of top ticket prices over the years:  1943 Oklahoma $4.80 • 1964 Hello Dolly $9.60 • 1975 A Chorus Line $15 • 1977 The  Act $25 • 1980 42nd Street $35 • 1989 Jerome Robbins’ Broadway $55 • 1994 Sunset Boulevard $75 • 2001 The Producers $480.                   

These FlexPay loans on Ticketmaster are issued by the Salt Lake City-based WebBank and facilitated by the Swedish payments technology firm Klarna. The terms are payments from six months or a year at an annual interest rate of 10 percent but that rate double to 20 percent if the initial promotion lapses. Industry pundits say the rate compares favorably with the average credit card fee now at 17 percent.

Another statistic, according to the Broadway League, is that in the past ten years the price of a Broadway ticket has increased 62 percent. This figure is more than double than the increase in average US wages as tracked by the Social Security administration. And this June, as a PS, the national household debt reached a high of $13.3 trillion.

We pretty much can agree that the cost of living has skyrocketed across the board. But has Broadway gone to far? Is Broadway an elitist pleasure for the rich, leaving the rest of us to incur (possibly more) debt to see live theater on the Great White Way? Or is this just the world we live in now—one where we need to just suck it up and deal with? What do you think?

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