CHARLOTTE, N.C. — In case you haven’t heard (yeah…right), “Hamilton,” the hottest show on Broadway and winner of 11 Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for drama, is coming to Charlotte in October.
And tickets officially went on sale at 8 a.m. Wednesday. Most people — there’s at least 65,000 of us — woke up early to get in the virtual waiting room before 7:30 a.m. Several hundred took the old-fashioned approach of getting out of bed and waiting in line at the Belk Theater in uptown.
There was a little bit of a technical issue early on, but that was resolved and everyone was able to get back into the virtual waiting room. And don't worry, we were assured that the process for purchasing tickets was random, so if you got kicked out, you didn't lose your place in line.
Even still, there was ANOTHER issue. Blumenthal Performing Arts confirmed a second issue kept them from selling tickets before 8:30 a.m.
The people who went out were able to get in line for a wristband. In turn, those wristbands would then be called by number at random for the right to purchase tickets. But getting a wristband isn’t a guarantee you’ll get tickets, because the wristbands would then be called by number in random groups. For example, numbers 250 through 300 could get called, but not necessarily the first or last wristband numbers.
At 10 a.m., Blumenthal Performing Arts tweeted that all on-site ticket sales for Wednesday ended. Online purchasing was still unavailable due to a large crackdown on bots infiltrating the system.
So when the tickets officially went on sale, everyone waiting online rushed to see where they'd be. The results were mixed, with a lot of disappointed numbers in the thousands.
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