How much would you pay to be in the same room as Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, watching them work? Is that price in the mid-hundreds of dollars? And would you double it to nearly a thousand for a slightly better seat?
The 15-week limited Broadway run of William Shakespeare’s Othello, featuring one of our greatest living actors in the title role (and another, pretty damn good actor as Iago), is betting that at least some people would. Orchestra-level advance tickets to the show run between $216 and $921, depending on where you sit (those $216 tickets, more in line with what a less starry straight play might charge, are at the far side of the row, which at least means you’re getting a slightly lesser chance of catching Covid or the flu alongside your mild discount). It’s the latest innovation in live-theater pricing, where you no longer need to visit a scalper to get price-gouged. But if you do peruse the second-hand sites, you could fork over that same grand to see the revival of Glengarry Glen Ross, starring Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr – an intriguing cast to be sure, albeit all a bit further down the list of greatest living actors than Washington.
