‘Hamilton’ tickets for Philly are going on sale: Here’s what you need to do to get them.
The two-step online process is now open, but only through Thursday night. Some tickets will also be sold at the Forrest Theatre box office starting July 9.
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After years of waiting, Philadelphians can finally buy single-show tickets to see the musical Hamilton here. An online process that opens at 10 a.m. today — and closes a minute before midnight on Thursday — is the first step for anyone who hopes to buy tickets online.
The actual sale date will be July 9, both online and at the Forrest Theatre box office, where a national touring production of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster musical will play Aug. 27 to Nov. 17.
Tickets range from $127-$197 (plus fees), with a limited number of premium $497 seats. There will also be 40 tickets available at $10 apiece by pre-show lottery for each performance, but you can’t try for those yet.
Both online and in-person sales have a set of rules designed to frustrate scalpers and their bots. Here is the rundown.
For online sales
Online ticket-seekers will need to follow these steps:
Go to Telecharge.com/Hamilton between 10 a.m. Monday, June 24, and 11:59 p.m. Thursday, June 27, to register. Registration does not guarantee tickets. Your registration will be verified to make sure you’re not a bot or a scalper, and Telecharge will then hold a random drawing among verified registrants.
Check your email on Wednesday, July 3. If you’re selected in the drawing, you’ll get an e-mail. It will confirm that you have gained access and tell you to watch out for another e-mail early on the morning of July 9. That second e-mail will have an access code (assigned at random; there’s no “line,” order, or priority) with which you can go online and shop for tickets.
Beginning at 9 a.m. on July 9, use your access code to shop for tickets online for all performances.
The order in which you register has no effect on whether you will be verified, or selected in the drawing. Nor does your access code have any effect on ticket availability when you get online on July 9. Tickets get scarcer the longer you wait, so the Kimmel Center is encouraging registrants who get selected to act early.
Tickets could sell out, as the Hamilton tours have in Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles (where demand was so high that it’s coming back next year), and it’s entirely possible that you could register, be selected, get a number, and at some point when you get online find the cupboard bare. Then again, tickets for the national tour opening June 25 in Baltimore were still available late last week.
The Kimmel has warned users to be extraordinarily cautious about “overpriced, and in some cases fraudulent,” tickets for the Philadelphia engagement that are being listed elsewhere online.
For in-person sales
A limited number of tickets will be available starting at 9 a.m. on July 9 at the Forrest Theatre Box Office, 1114 Walnut St. No preregistration is required.
You can start lining up at 7 a.m. You’ll get color-coded wristbands that randomly assign you to different 30-minute time slots during the day to come back and buy tickets. The number of wristbands is, like the tickets, limited. Ticket-seekers who do not get wristbands may be able to buy tickets on July 9 after all customers with wristbands have been served.
Once you have your wristband, you needn’t stay in line. But when your time slot arrives, be on hand at the box office.
Limits, and lottery details
For both online and in-person sales, there’s a purchase limit: four tickets per household.
For each performance during the run, there will be a digital lottery for 40 seats at $10 apiece. Either go to the Hamilton official site at hamiltonmusical.com/lottery/ or download the official Hamilton app at the App Store or Google Play. But don’t rush: Details of the lottery, including the opening date, will come later this summer, closer to the actual run.
The Kimmel has already mailed out 18,000 tickets for the first two weeks of Hamilton to season-ticket holders who signed up last year.
Frances Egler, senior director of programming and presentations at the Kimmel Center, said that the two-step online verification process for online ticket sales, more and more common at high-demand events, is an effort to be fair to people who want tickets, ensuring that they do not have to compete against robots and automated ticket-hawkers.
“We’re working with the Hamilton producers, who continue to do this with the Broadway show and the national tours. We’re trying to make sure fans get first access to tickets. We’re constantly battling automated sites that get tickets ahead of fans and resell them for higher prices on the secondary market.”