They are not throwing away their sh… oh.
The West End debut of Hamilton – the smash hit hip-hop musical that stormed New York in 2015 – is the most hotly anticipated moment in London’s theatre calendar, with tickets from the first booking period selling out in under an hour.
Unfortunately for these eager Founding Fathers, the first two weeks of previews have now been cancelled with less than three months to go, as the huge technical project to refurbish the Palace Theatre in Victoria have been hit by delays.
“The time constraints to access the land around the theatre to enable the rebuild and getting the show open to the public by the end of this year have been equally tight, not helped by the theatre being built over the huge King’s Scholars’ Pond Sewer, an active 200 year-old brick tunnel.”
Altogether, sixteen shows from November 21 ’til December 6 have been called off. With the theatre’s sold-out capacity of over 1,500, that means as many as 24,000 audience members may have suddenly lost their prized early seats.
With the rest of the run also sold out, it seemed as if re-seating all these people would be almost impossible – but the organisers have an ace up their frilly sleeves:
A large numbers of seats were held in reserve to be released at the time the building was nearing completion. Using this pool of seats will allow us to offer patrons the opportunity to be re-seated as early as possible into the run.
People affected by the cancellation should hear more about this from Ticketmaster later today – fingers crossed it’s a happy resolution for most.
If anything, it’s rather worse news for those procrastinators who will now probably not get a surprise opportunity to grab this secret hoard of reserved seats. But as we only found out about them ninety seconds ago, we’ll try and get over it.
For more hard-to-get tickets, see Punchdrunk’s new immersive show on the streets of London.
Also published on Medium.