Hell I’m in Chicago and I can’t get a nice three-course restaurant dinner for two with wine for $130. Well, depending on what you consider nice I guess.
I’ll take your word on it. Here’s an example of Hamilton’s lead producer Jeffrey Seller making the distinction:
“in Chicago”
Sure. I’m not a theater person so if it makes less sense in the context of other cities, my apologies for confusing you all 
Broadway theater is a different animal than road companies of shows that started on Broadway. You rarely want to do anything that will limit your run on Broadway, while a road company of a show can always move on to a new city/new market.
No one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.
Somebody really should write a bio musical for Yogi Berra. So many good lyrics to just pluck from the apocrypha…
I’ve read that some of the regional theater companies are advising if you want to see Hamilton to become a subscriber the year before it’s supposed to come. Then become a subscriber the year it’s coming and hope for the best. They expect there to be so many people to become subscribers the year of, that you’ll need a leg up on them.
StG
It’s pay the theater or pay the scalpers, really. If they price it too cheap then the scalpers make all the money instead of the people putting on the show. It’s a fight big name musicians have been dealing with for a long time, too.
You get some people like Springsteen who’ll play three or four nights in one city and charge low prices – but your name has to be on the ticket, no transfers! – and on the other hand you get people like the Rolling Stones who will charge $500 a seat and let’s see if the scalpers make money on that. (They will. Market price for a Stones show is probably over a grand, at least. But it’s harder for scalpers the higher the face value of the ticket is.)
Just thought I would post an update.
I have just booked a front stalls, premium seat for Hamilton in London on my birthday next year. Normally, I would find £200 for a ticket outrageous, but it suddenly looked like a bargain!
I am appalled at the rise in Broadway Ticket Prices. They have gone up much faster than inflation. Granted, the prices back when I was a kid were arguably too low, but there’s no excuse for the absurd prices many shows demand today.
(At the rish of sound like an old codger, I note that it used to be possible to purchase matineee tickets on the day of the show for between $20 and $300 bucks for a major first-run show. That’s from the box office – without having to go to TKTS. I saw the Royal Shakespeare Company performing William Gillette and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in 1975 for (bear in mind that this was SRO)
$2.50
That’s correct – no slipped decimal point or anything.)
I was amazed when tickets first broke the $1900 mark with Nicholas Nickleby in the 1980s, but pretty soon that was the norm. The last show I saw on Broadway was Amadeus, until we went to see Spring Awakening with our daughter a couple of years ago.
Ticket prices here in Boston have kept pace with Broadway.
I see most of my shows here in Schenectady; our seats (we have a subscription) are about $25 a show.
If Hamilton comes next year, we’ll get first crack at those seats, too.
Just reminiscing.
Back when I was in high school in the 1970s, I was a theater buff. In those days, I could go to Duffy Square on Wednesday around noon and get half price tickets to most shows. So, as a teen, I could see Broadway plays for around six or seven bucks. Not that much more than I’d pay for a movie.
Today, even HALF price tickets are a hundred dollars. Which means a teenager in Astoria today could never see the shows I saw.
It looks there are quite a few slipped decimal points in there…
Not in my mind, but, yep – that’s what I paid.
At the same time, “nosebleed” seats at the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center cost $1.50. No joke.
So when was $1,900 (the amount you paid in the 1980s for the Nicholas Nickleby tickets) the norm? Or is it the norm now?
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say you can still do that now, for every show…
Tickets went on sale today…the presale was two weeks ago…and I forgot. 
Slipped digit there – should be “between $20 and $30 per show”. And, yes, I saw 1776 from an Orchestra seat for that much back in the early 70s.