Two weeks ago I wrote that the October arrivals had mostly shown up without a cheap door. That post needs two updates, and one of them is a correction.
The update: Wanted posted a $35 digital lottery on October 13, a week before its opening night. The correction: 860 has had four separate doors at $59 since its first preview, and I said it had nothing. Twice. Both of those posts have been fixed, and the honest version is below.
Wanted: $35, and the entry opens at midnight
Wanted started previews at the James Earl Jones Theatre on October 15 and opens November 8. The lottery runs through Telecharge's Lottery + Rush site, same plumbing as every Shubert house, and the mechanics are the ordinary Telecharge family ones:
- $35 a ticket, offered for every performance.
- Entries open at 12 AM ET the day before the performance.
- Drawings at 10 AM and 3 PM ET the same day.
- Five hours to claim once you are notified.
- One entry per person per day, two tickets per entry.
- Seats are subject to availability and may be partly obstructed. Telecharge says so up front, which is more than some platforms manage.
Five hours is the forgiving end of the board. When I ranked every Broadway lottery by its claim window, the Telecharge family came second only to a 24-hour draw, and a full afternoon ahead of Broadway Direct's 60 minutes. You can win this one during a meeting and still be fine.
The thing to actually plan around is not the midnight open. It is the 3 PM drawing. Enter whenever you like after midnight; set the alarm for the afternoon, because that is when you need to be holding a phone.
The 860 correction
On October 5 I wrote that 860 had posted nothing three weeks into previews. On October 8 I used it as the counterexample to a show that had. Both wrong. Billy Crystal's one-man show announced its ticketing on September 29, before the first preview on October 1, and it has been running ever since.
It is not one door. It is four:
- $59 digital lottery through Telecharge Lottery + Rush — entries open at 12 AM the day before and close at 3 PM, drawings at 10 AM and 3 PM, five hours to claim, limit two.
- $59 digital rush, released at 11 AM on the day of the performance, limit two.
- $59 general rush at the Imperial box office, day of, from 10 AM Monday through Saturday and 12 PM Sunday. Cash or credit, limit two.
- $99 digital cancellation line, which forms the day before each sold-out performance.
Three swings at the same $59 in a single day, two of them from your couch. That is a better-stocked board than most musicals twice its size, and I spent two posts telling you it did not exist. 860 opens Wednesday at the Imperial and is booked through January 3.
The pattern I had backwards
The argument in the October 5 post was that uptown, the cheap door arrives after opening night, while downtown it arrives the day tickets go on sale. Wanted and 860 both break it, and they break it the same way: both are Shubert houses, both route through rush.telecharge.com, and both posted before their opening.
The better version of the rule is about plumbing, not prestige. A house that already runs on Telecharge's lottery infrastructure can switch a show on cheaply, so it does, early. A show that has to negotiate a platform deal from scratch takes longer, and the gap shows up as weeks of silence.
Which is roughly what the rest of the October board still looks like. As of this morning, nothing posted for:
- A Few Good Men at the Vivian Beaumont, in previews since October 8. Lincoln Center runs LincTix instead — $37 and $40.50 for theatergoers 21 to 35 — which is a price for a category of person, not a lottery.
- Downstate at the Booth, which starts previews today.
- Much Ado About Nothing at the Winter Garden, from October 31.
- Here There Are Blueberries at the Ethel Barrymore, from November 2.
Two of those four are Shubert houses, so by my own new rule they should move sooner rather than later. I will say plainly that this is a prediction and not a fact, and you should hold me to it the way you should have held me to the 860 claim.
What to do this week
If you want Wanted, enter after midnight and be reachable in the afternoon. Enter for one ticket if there is any chance you are going alone — the Telecharge rules, like Broadway Direct's, oblige you to buy the number you asked for.
If you want 860, you have three tries a day at $59 and they do not conflict. Enter the lottery the night before, check the digital rush at 11 AM, and if both miss, the Imperial box office opens at 10 AM and nobody queues for a one-man show the way they queue for a musical.
And if you want Other Desert Cities, its $49 Lucky Seat lottery and $49 TodayTix rush are both still live, which as of today makes it the cheapest of the three star vehicles that have opened this month.
The full board, updated as these move, is on the lottery hub. If you are new to any of this, start with how to win every Broadway lottery, and if you want the Telecharge rules in detail, that platform has its own guide.
