It took all of five hours and 11 minutes for tickets to "Hamilton" in Denver to be snatched up -- four at a time -- by the masses. But afterwards, people are questioning the fairness of the process.
Here in our office, at least 10 of us logged in to the Denver Center for Performing Arts (DCPA) website on Monday morning, each being issued a spot on the virtual wait list for the hottest theater tickets of the year. Though we all got on within minutes of each other -- around 10 a.m. -- our numbers on the waiting list varied by several thousand -- from 150,649, to 121,070, to the best spot of 103,647.
At the time, we chalked it up to the sheer number of people across Colorado who all had the same idea.
Even the Denver Broncos' kicker Brandon McManus was in line ...
Finally, at 3:11 p.m., the DCPA announced that all the tickets were gone. Personally, I'd moved up a total of 14,013 spots within five hours and 11 minutes. And of course, none of us here in our office ended up with tickets.
As it turns out, though, there seems to have been a lot of "hanky-panky" occurring on the DCPA website. In the hours afterwards, some lucky ticket-holders shared that they were able to log on before 10 a.m., and by some glitch, purchase their tickets before they officially went on sale.
Then there were those, like my co-workers and me, who were given incredibly long waits, even though we joined the wait list at 10 a.m. In our experience, it wasn't even possible to get on early: Before 10, we received a message saying that the tickets were not on sale yet, and there was even a countdown to the moment that sales began, at which time we were thrown into a virtual waiting room (completely randomly!).
“My daughter in Littleton got right online at 9 a.m. and had about 120,000 people ahead of her,” Linda Carney, an Englewood resident, told
The Know. “I got online a couple minutes later and had 40,000 people ahead of me. I don’t understand how she got such a bad number. Or how my son got tickets before 10 a.m.”
That seems to be a recurring theme. It's not that people were necessarily logging in illegally; it's that the random placements were unfair -- and that the website was screwing up.
According to
Fox 31, however, there was a link being shared on social media that, when used, did let online buyers skip the line. The DCPA says they're looking into it.
So, here's the math:
The tour of the Broadway musical
Hamilton hits Denver's Buell Theatre on February 27, and will run through April 1, with 40 total performances. Since the Buell can seat 2,839, simple math shows that 113,560 lucky Coloradans will get to see
Hamilton while it's here.
But since DCPA season ticket subscribers had already had first dibs at more than 44,000 of those seats over the last week, only about 69,000 seats remained. And given that each person who reached the top of the wait list probably purchased the limit of four tickets, that would mean only the first 17,000 or so buyers (out of more than 150,000) were successful -- which makes sense, since my place on the list only jumped up 14,013 spots.
After ticket sales ended, the mood here in the office could best be described as "glum," with multiple giphys being passed around ...
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[embed]https://giphy.com/gifs/angry-computer-frustrated-EmB4QtACPVBpS[/embed]
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One co-worker even began making plans to see
Hamilton in Chicago -- the closest city with a permanent run of the musical.
So what about you? Did you manage to get tickets? Did you feel like the DCPA's website was glitching out? Do you feel like the online process was fair or not? Please tell us in the comments below!
