Shakespeare in the Park Lines- Page 11
Shakespeare in the Park Lines
wonkit
Broadway Legend Joined: 9/30/08
#250re: Shakespeare in the Park Lines
Posted: 7/12/09 at 10:17amI was going to sign up for virtual line but since I have already seen this wonderful production once, it seemed selfish to take one of the few remaining opportunities away from those who may not have seen it at all.
#251re: Shakespeare in the Park Lines
Posted: 7/12/09 at 10:49am
Good morning! Managed to get a couple hours of sleep, nice to wake up here, its beautiful out!
As far as the condition of Central Park West, we walked by portions that were disgusting. Around where we were at 84th street it was clean as far as I saw, but up towards the front was pretty nasty.
RippedMan
Broadway Legend Joined: 8/14/05
#253re: Shakespeare in the Park Lines
Posted: 7/12/09 at 2:33pmWe were btwn 82-83 and picked up our garbage, but it's true, as we walked in the sidewalk was pretty nasty. people left chairs, pillows,blankets and tons of trash after they left. Pretty sad..I guess common courtesy and sense are a dying art form...
toomuchfreetime.tumblr.com
#254re: Shakespeare in the Park Lines
Posted: 7/12/09 at 3:59pmIn no way was the Public staff member out of line for reprimanding people if blankets and chairs were left all over the street. They are the ones who will be fined for that mess. How is it in poor taste to point that out to grown adults who throw the gift of free tickets back in their face?
Like a firework unexploded
Wanting life but never knowing how
Wanting life but never knowing how
bwayrose2
Understudy Joined: 4/12/07
#255re: Shakespeare in the Park Lines
Posted: 7/12/09 at 4:10pmI would venture to guess that most of those people who left the mess behind are brokers or hired by brokers. They don't give a damn about the Public.
#256re: Shakespeare in the Park Lines
Posted: 7/12/09 at 4:19pm
I would not be surprised actually. I have seen 3-4 people there who've been there before and just did not quite look like they were there for the show. As a matter of fact 1-2 of them were even kicked out of the line.
Well the police was there today and will be there in the evening as well. Let's hope they can catch a few of them bad guys! :)
toomuchfreetime.tumblr.com
#257re: Shakespeare in the Park Lines
Posted: 7/12/09 at 4:24pm
OMG!
This is sick!!!!
Broker Bastards
toomuchfreetime.tumblr.com
#258re: Shakespeare in the Park Lines
Posted: 7/12/09 at 4:37pmThis is not new, unfortunately. Whenever a show at the Delacorte becomes a hit, people take advantage of the situation and try to sell their tickets. During the original, three-performance concert run of Hair in September 2007, scalpers were standing in the 81st Street subway station selling tickets for $500 a pair. Ditto Hair last year, The Seagull, Mother Courage, etc.
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
#259re: Shakespeare in the Park Lines
Posted: 7/12/09 at 4:47pm
I know...I guess it just never really ceases to amaze me.
I wish the police actually called some of those nbs and trap them...I know it's impossible...oh well..some people will have a load of fun with their karma! :)
toomuchfreetime.tumblr.com
#260re: Shakespeare in the Park LinesIm on line now
Posted: 7/12/09 at 4:57pmI'm on line now and I got here at 10am. I'm about 38th in line.
stevenycguy
Broadway Star Joined: 12/7/05
#261re: Shakespeare in the Park LinesIm on line now
Posted: 7/12/09 at 8:04pm
The Public Theater would benefit themselves in a lot of ways if they gave out tickets to summer supporters ($170 each), but then gave all remaining tickets to the virtual lottery (instead of making people wait in person)
(1) No more cleaning up the mess after people who camped out all night on Central Park West
(2) No more verbal abuses from people who waited all night and all morning & still didn't get tickets
(3) Less likely that scalpers would constantly get a large chunk of the tickets and re-sell them. There are about 300 posts on Craigslist from the past few days offering to sell tickets (scalpers, NYU students, etc)
(4) The "good feeling" that comes from realizing you didn't make hundreds of people spend their entire night & morning on line
Hopefully the Public Theater employees are sick of cleaning up all the mess on Central Park West, sick of dealing with people's verbal abuses, sick of monitoring the line all morning, etc etc. The virtual lottery solves all these problems.
Yankeefan007
Broadway Legend Joined: 3/20/04
#262re: Shakespeare in the Park LinesIm on line now
Posted: 7/12/09 at 8:17pmIt was a lot easier when the line at Lafayette and Astor was still available.
ghostlight2
Broadway Legend Joined: 12/5/04
#263re: Shakespeare in the Park LinesIm on line now
Posted: 7/12/09 at 8:24pm
But an all-virtual line adds other problems. The sad truth is that people don't value tickets won in a lottery as much, and very frequently don't even show up to get them. It makes it too painless. Plus their current system can't handle the traffic it gets now (of course, that can be fixed).
I do agree the system needs to be modified. Back in the day it didn't have to be an all day/night affair. They should go back to the old way.
And don't think for one second an all v/l would slow down the scalpers - it would probably help them.
#264re: Shakespeare in the Park LinesIm on line now
Posted: 7/12/09 at 8:28pm
I've been thinking about this a lot after seeing what went on over the weekend, and any possible solution I've been able to think of still has problems. If they do something to stop people from lining up before a certain time, you'll just have people hovering somewhere UNTIL they can line up. If you make it all lottery based, the servers crash, and the volume of unused tickets will probably be disproportionally high. An in-person lottery would take hours, and you'd still get people lining up, because they'd want to make sure they make the lottery cut-off. I agree that the system needs to be modified somehow, it's just hard to find the perfect solution.
#265re: Shakespeare in the Park LinesIm on line now
Posted: 7/12/09 at 8:43pm
If you do a raffle type lottery it could work. There wouldn't be any need to have a cutoff - at the appointed time (say, 10AM) you start handing out raffle tickets. You know the type, the little numbered tickets that come in pairs. You get one side, the other goes into a giant fishbowl. Everybody gets a ticket, there is no cutoff. You can hand out tickets until the drawing time. Say, noon or 1PM. Then they start drawing tickets out of the fishbowl (giant hopper, whatever). As soon as your ticket number is called you go up and claim your tickets for the show. As soon as all the seats are given out, that's it. Everybody else go home. If you handle it properly you can distribute all the available seats in under an hour.
And it doesn't matter if you get there at 1AM or 10AM, the only thing that matters is the number on the ticket you get. Totally random.
Sarcasm is an allergic reaction to stupid people.
bwayrose2
Understudy Joined: 4/12/07
#266re: Shakespeare in the Park LinesIm on line now
Posted: 7/12/09 at 8:45pm
Supposedly, they would like to go to an all lottery system but they have too many no shows from that system, even when the servers don't crash. They don't want empty houses. That is the reason that some nights, you have 200 people from the Standby Line who are able to get in.
Like it or not, the physical line tickets are actually used.
I would think they are constantly rethinking how to make things better...
bwayrose2
Understudy Joined: 4/12/07
#267re: Shakespeare in the Park LinesIm on line now
Posted: 7/12/09 at 8:50pmHumbugfoto, that's probably a good system when there is a manageable group of people. However, when you have thousands of people like this past week, it becomes harder to manage. And that system, without having to wait, would probably encourage more people to show up because they could come down at lunchtime or on their way to work so why not take the chance. You could create bigger mobs that way. As it is, the staff rushes to get the tickets distributed fast and furiously because they have to get ready for the show that night. I did have a friend who worked at the Delacorte a couple of summers and he said that the ticket distribution is not all they are doing during the day so they do need to move it along so they can clean and stuff programs and do all the other stuff that needs to be done up there.
heo1128
Broadway Star Joined: 7/9/08
#268re: Shakespeare in the Park LinesIm on line now
Posted: 7/12/09 at 9:10pmMaybe they should just stop giving out day-of tickets. They could still be free, but they could just release the tickets at once and the rules could be maybe 2 tickets to up to three performances per person, or something like that. Or maybe they could just do a physical lotto every day like other shows do.
#269re: Shakespeare in the Park LinesIm on line now
Posted: 7/12/09 at 9:32pmWhy didn't they give out the tickets at the Public this year out of curiousity? It always ticks me off when people sell free tickets, off topic people were charging hundreds for the free Bon Jovi tickets last year on Craigs List.
#270re: Shakespeare in the Park LinesIm on line now
Posted: 7/12/09 at 9:34pm
They could still be free, but they could just release the tickets at once and the rules could be maybe 2 tickets to up to three performances per person, or something like that.
Then you bar any non-NYers from seeing the show, and give scalpers 6 weeks to find buyers for their tickets on eBay and Craigs List instead of 6 hours.
humbug, your system is basically the lotto, just with raffle tickets instead of names. Only in a perfect world would it take under an hour. I've done the lotto at shows with only 20 tickets available, and it still takes forty-five minutes before everyone leaves with tickets. 1500 tickets would take all day.
Like a firework unexploded
Wanting life but never knowing how
Wanting life but never knowing how
#271re: Shakespeare in the Park LinesIm on line now
Posted: 7/12/09 at 10:34pm
Yes, it is just a lotto, but the randomness of it avoids the overnight camping out and hours and hours waiting.
And as I understand the type lotto you're talking about, you have to allot time for the people to pay for their tickets. With free tickets, that's one less step you have to take. The last time I was involved in a lotto the way I described it, they handed out 350 tickets (well, pairs of tickets, so 700 people) in about an hour. It requires a fair amount of staffing, I'll admit, but it worked seamlessly. One person to announce the number, and then five or six people to hand out the actual tickets. They called your raffle number, and said which station (numbered 1-6, or however many people you had available) you should proceed to, then handed the ticket to the person at that station. And then drew the next ticket. And so on. When (if) your number was called, you went to that station, they matched the ticket numbers and then handed you an envelope with your two tickets in it. There was a fair amount of venue security to keep people moving (and all the staffing in this case was volunteer).
The truth of the matter is, there's no one foolproof way to go about it. No matter what you do, how you structure it, people are going to complain about the outcome. And since waiting on line in the park is part of the experience, I don't think they're likely to change the system any time soon. Kind of a version of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". 
Sarcasm is an allergic reaction to stupid people.
#272re: Shakespeare in the Park LinesIm on line now
Posted: 7/12/09 at 11:18pm
I've only been going to Shakespeare in the Park shows for the past three summers, so I never experienced this, but have heard that the way it used to work was that tickets were given out at 6pm for an 8pm show, so people would wait on line during the afternoon, get tickets at 6, and come back for the show at 8- what was wrong with this system, why did it get moved up to a 1pm distribution?
And yeah, I thought that last year the construction going on down at The Public was the reason why being able to line up there last year stopped, but is that a permanent change now? Any chance of lining up at The Public coming back next summer?
RippedMan
Broadway Legend Joined: 8/14/05
#273re: Shakespeare in the Park LinesIm on line now
Posted: 7/12/09 at 11:54pmAnyone know the dude's name?
#274re: Shakespeare in the Park LinesIm on line now
Posted: 7/12/09 at 11:55pmI believe the lack of distribution at The Public still has to do with the construction. It's a rather massive ongoing project.
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