Premium seats for the London production of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash-hit hip-hop musical, are now among the most expensive tickets in West End history.
Some premium tickets for the show at the recently renovated Victoria Palace theatre have been increased by 25% and are now on sale for £250 for performances on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. That relates to tickets bought for the new booking period, for performances from the end of July to mid-December 2018. In the previous booking period, the top-price ticket was set at £200.
West End theatre fans expressed dismay online at the price hikes. “Anything but surprising,” wrote one user on Theatre Board. “I booked (a year ago) to see it a second time during the first booking period because I thought it was a safe bet prices would rise very sharply when they opened a new booking period … People will still pay, but this sets a precedent. Where one show leads, others will follow.”
Research by the Stage newspaper last year revealed that the most expensive tickets for more than half of West End shows are now priced above £100. The most expensive ticket in the Stage’s 2017 survey was for The Book of Mormon (£202.25). In 2015, Elf – the Musical was offering premium tickets at £240. The most expensive premium tickets in the West End for both parts of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child are £125 each.
These are all official prices: tickets for popular productions such as Harry Potter and the Cursed Child have been put up for sale on secondary ticketing websites for thousands of pounds. In London, Hamilton is operating a paperless ticketing system to combat touts.
There are 240 tickets priced at £37.50 or less for every performance of Hamilton. The musical also has a lottery system, with winners able to buy one or two tickets for £10 each. Hamilton’s lottery initiative began on Broadway, where top-price seats for the show are far more expensive than in London. During the lucrative Christmas period in 2017, premium tickets for the New York production reached an eye-watering $1,150.
