Why Hamilton is music to the ears of London touts | Tim Dowling
Tickets for the musical Hamilton, which has garnered many awards and much praise stateside (“highly overrated” – D Trump), have gone on sale in Britain, with the first performance still almost a year away. I’m currently reading the show’s source material: Ron Chernow’s doorstop biography of Alexander Hamilton, the founding father known throughout America as “the guy on the 10 dollar bill”. It’s not in any way overrated, although it would never have occurred to me to make a musical out of it.
Hamilton West End tickets appear on resale sites despite anti-tout measures
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Because tickets are in such demand, Cameron Mackintosh, the coproducer of the British version, has introduced a paperless ticketing system as an anti-touting measure: punters need to bring the credit card they paid with to the theatre. This hasn’t quite killed the practice – one resale site already has tickets on sale for £2,499 each. Yes, that’s right, almost £2.5k. And for that you get what’s described as a “Buyer Must be Escorted Walk In Event” – the tout has to come along on the night to get your ticket for you. I gather this is pretty common these days, although I’d think twice about paying over two grand to someone in exchange for a promise to meet me there.
I cannot help wondering what Alexander Hamilton would have made of the touting issue. When he was basically inventing the US financial system, as the first treasury secretary, he faced an analogous dilemma. His fledgling nation, driven into debt by war, had furnished unpaid veterans with IOUs. With the survival of the country in doubt, these had depreciated sharply, and lots of impoverished ex-soldiers sold them to speculators at a heavy discount. However, once Hamilton had put the country’s finances on a more stable footing, the speculators stood to make a pile.
There were suggestions from certain quarters that any profits from the sale of these IOUs should go to the original holders. Hamilton knew that siding against patriots in favour of speculators would be unpopular, but he also recognised that the value of any security resided in the notion that it was freely transferable – whoever has the ticket gets to go through the turnstile.
Hamilton’s decision to enshrine the rights of speculators may have in some way contributed to the American solution to the Hamilton ticket tout dilemma: in order to discourage profiteering, the Broadway producers simply raised the price of the best seats to £700. In London they’ll be a mere £190 for the top-priced premium tickets. If you can get ’em.
Yawn chorus
My phone buzzes seven times in succession in the dead of night: either there has been some kind of celebrity massacre, or my family’s message group has sprung to life. Fortunately for the celebrities, it’s the latter. Back in America a bird is trapped in one of the bedrooms of my dad’s house, and my 95-year-old father is trying, and failing, to coax it out through an open window. It’s a developing situation. There are regular video updates from my brother – with captions like “He’s got the fishing net now” – and remote commentary supplied by my sisters from their respective homes. It is strangely gripping – the bird, one can plainly see, is going nowhere – but there also seems to be a general failure to understand that from my vantage point it’s also two o’clock in the frigging morning. I put the phone face down on the floor, where it buzzes intermittently for another hour. In the morning, when I want to know what happened – everyone else is asleep.
Backseat driving
‘I underwent the procedure last summer, and I like to think I know my way around a colon.’ Photograph: sturti/Getty Images
On Wednesday afternoon Channel 4 will broadcast a live colonoscopy – a world first – in a 90-second ad in partnership with Cancer Research UK. I will be watching in the spirit of someone who watches a travel documentary about a particular stretch of Thailand’s coast – not because I want to go there someday, but because I’ve already been there and I want to show off. I underwent the procedure last summer, and I like to think I know my way around a colon. “Tricky turn coming up just here,” I will say, pointing. I’ll be alone, of course. Think of me.
And this just in: the bird is free.