July 08, 2005

Even Charles Dickens had ticket scalpers in NYC

The state's new scalping law limits the ticket resale to only 45 percent more than the face value of the ticket. Yet there is an exemption for venues with fewer than 6,000 seats, such as Broadway theaters. That's means its entirely legal to buy a seat for Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane's "The Odd Couple" for more than $1,000.

For a little historical perspective, take a look at this antique New-York Daily Tribune currently for auction at eBay. Charles Dickens was in New York in 1868, giving a number of readings. Most readings had a $2 cover charge, but there is also an advertisement for "Reserved seats for Mr. Dickens’s last readings in New York can be procured at a slight advance over the regular price ..." Though maybe that "slight advance" was more like the TicketMaster surcharge, or one of those now-ubiquitous "theater restoration fees."

The same newspaper also carries an amusing little commentary about New Yorkers’ waning admiration for the writer:

Charles Dickens gives to-night his last reading for the present in New-York. The excitement which attended his arrival and first public appearance among us has subsided, and the impression one receives from a remarkable man, and from the remarkable spectacle of a great author embodying and enacting his own literary conception, are becoming more dispassionate. Admiration begets fault-finding. Questions outside the true merits od the reading come up. Is the reader as perfect in acting as he is owerful in writing? As an artist is he superior or inferior to Franny Kemble? Other questions, too. Was it fair or generous in a man who had been received with adulation at his first coming among us, to reprove so sharply as he did in his American Notes? Can one gather a fair estimate of character from the pages of Martin Chuzzlewit? We are a thin-skinned nation yet. Young people and young nations generally are. ...

July 8, 2005 09:23 AM in Broadway, History

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