Broadway Tickets - How One Frugal Guy Got Them - and Stayed Happy

By Terry Adamson
Dateline: New York, NY September 28th 2004

Recently my wife asked me to buy some Broadway Tickets for the show Wicked. The show has been on Broadway for a few months, so its relatively new.
She had heard how wonderful the show was and as our anniversary was coming up she wanted to see it.
The Broadway show Wicked won a bunch of the Tony awards, so its a pretty popular show.
I had read that the Tony Awards had changed their format in 2004 and a single show is only allowed to win 5 awards and no more.
This means that the other Broadway shows have a chance of winning - it also means that these other Broadway shows can get some of the Broadway audiences traffic, which keeps Broadway booming.
Apparently after the Tony awards come out, everyone flocks to the winning shows and disregards the rest - I say disregard, but really mean that the other audiences take a noticeable dive in sales.
It is only human nature that people want to see the top shows, but it become clear that Broadway has far more to offer than the VERY top show.And so began my hunt for cheap tickets for Wicked, I am not frugal to the point of shopping in the outlet malls, but I have always said that you should save money anytime you can, especially if the product is the same thing for different prices - its like being on a flight and finding that the guy next to you bought his flight for $100 less than you did. So a Broadway ticket for less than retail was my goal.My hunt started at the official Broadway show web site of the show. It didn't shed much light on the tickets, just a glitzy flash page that didn't even load properly so all the links weren't clickable. When will web developers ever learn the rules that Flash should never be used on an entry page and never use them for links anywhere - just in case it breaks - obviously these developers didn't read web site development for dummies.I know that TicketMaster and Telecharge are the Broadway Ticket powerhouses. A Broadway show either sells their tickets thru one or the other powerhouse, but never both.
TicketMaster, was the official vendor of Wicked Tickets. So off I went to their web site. I discovered that they have sold all the tickets for the next 3 months and were taking orders for the 4th month, that's way beyond our anniversary and probably closer to a divorce than I would like, so I figured that I must be able to source these Broadway tickets from elsewhere.
The "elsewhere" turns out to be a whole underworld of alternative source of Broadway tickets -
First there are some show clubs like Hit show club, Theatre Development Fund and Fundtix. Then there are email offers from Theatermania, Playbill and nytix.com. Then there are the periodicals that turn their hand to this, specifically, The New York Times, Time Out New York and the Village Voice. Even Time Warner Cable, the local Cable TV company, gets into the mix by sending out Broadway show offers inside the cable bills.
t was the discount Broadway ticket service called nytix.com that I found the most success with. You do have to pay $3 for access for 30 days, but the research was choc full of unique offers and discounts so it more than made up for the price of a medium Starbucks Latte They had an enormous list of codes and offers that seemed to be an aggregation of all the other things I had seen plus a number of extra gems thrown in. It was one of these gems (a rather spiffy discount code actually) that not only scored me a ticket to Wicked but also got me a 20% discount because I was a AAA member - for the record I have never been a AAA member, I don't even have a car but nytix.com gave me this discount code that made me look I was.We picked up our tickets from the box office - nytix.com told us to order them and pick them up directly from the box office, so we didn't have to pay the TicketMaster charges of $8 per ticket.
I feel like the grinning cat who got the cream as my wife thanks me for the anniversary gift, little does she know we did at a discount.
Now I have to work on getting a car, I wonder....