What a Wicked Thing to Do

Last week, the Orange County Performing Arts Center sent out a notice that tickets for Wicked would go on sale Monday at 10:00 AM. It noted that seating was limited due to “unexpected demand” and recommended using the website for orders:

The quickest way to acquire tickets will be ordering online at the link provided below, choosing your date, and then selecting the “Best Available” seating option, which allows the computer system to select the best seats.

So yesterday morning, I checked the website around 9:30… and the website was already down. I tried calling at 10:00 and couldn’t get through. By 11:00, the website was still down, the phones appeared to have been disconnected, and I decided to take an early lunch and drive up to the box office.

My first clue that something was wrong was that I had to park on the roof of the parking structure. There was no sign of a line from above, but as I approached the stairway leading down to the box office from the main entrance, I started to hear the commotion of lots and lots of voices.

I followed what looked like a loose line back toward the parking structure. As I reached what appeared to be the end of the line, I realized it was actually two lines — or, more accurately, one line making a U-turn at the entrance to the structure. I followed it back toward the box office, and got almost all the way up to the front before finding the end of the line.

There was no way I could get through that in an hour, or even two. I figured I didn’t need to see the show that badly, went to grab lunch and returned to work.

I kept trying both the phone and the website over the course of the day, occasionally able to get a list of showtimes and ticket prices, but not much else. And by the time I could get into the phones or website today, they had completely sold out.

OK, shows sell out. I can deal with that. But there are two things that particularly annoy me about this:

First, some genius planning the tour decided it would be perfectly OK to have a two-week run in Orange County and no stop in Los Angeles. That meant that in addition to everyone locally who wanted to see the show, everyone in LA who missed it last year or wanted to see it again was competing for the same tickets.

Second, OCPAC specifically suggested using the website, which turned out to be incapable of handling the demand even before tickets even went on sale. (This is one case where it would have been better if they’d used Ticketmaster, who would’ve been able to handle the traffic.)