A show is under no obligation to place seats on TKTS.
The show, 'Jersey Boys', is doing well enough to only sent tickets there on a few performances now and again. It does, however, sell seats there at 25% off far more than they do 50%.
From my experience years ago working in the box office, if a show was still doing pretty well it was carefully watched on the day as to how door sales may be in the few hours before curtain up to help a show get up to capacity. A lot of shows I worked on would sometimes send as few as 10 seats per performance. This was mainly to fill up back and/or side seats that would be hard to sell at last minute.
Some shows would, and I'm sure still do, send as many as 100 seats to every show- 'Leonardo'- Jeez we could give them away!
in the first 10/15 years of the TKTS booth opening for a show to have seats there was looked upon as being a rare opportunity to see a show cheap and unlike these days it wasn't seen as an indication that the show was doing poor business so its selling it's self at half price! Its a shame it seen that way to day as it is certainly not always true.
Its a lot easier these days for theatres to deal with the allocation sent to TKTS as everything is by computer. In the days of paper plans, the tickets would pulled and invoiced to the booth and every day at 12 midday a courier would pick up the seats from every participating theatre and take them to the booth. If a show sold well at the booth they would be call the theatre and request an extra allocation. Any unsold seats at the booth would be returned to the theatre around 6/7pm evrty night and put for normal full price sale at the box office.
You can imagine how much easier all these allocations are now with the press of a button.
Updated On: 11/10/08 at 03:32 PM