For many shows, half-price is the new full price
Gerry McCambridge autographs a lot of ticket stubs after his mentalism act, and never gets over how many different prices there are to the same show.
"It's interesting to see how it varies. Who did their research, who looked for discounts and who just walked up to the box office and said, 'Gimme three tickets.' "
The fact that some people still do the latter means we're never likely to see an end to inflated face values. David Saxe is McCambridge's landlord at the V Theater. He says 80 percent of tickets are discounted by various vendors, but that still leaves enough full-priced sales to take the steam out of any initiative to make face values more realistic and show ticketing less like an airline, where as McCambridge points out, "Nobody pays the same price."
"If all the middlemen suddenly went away, how are they going to find you?" Saxe asks. "(Then) you have to spend on advertising. There's always going to be money flowing somewhere to capture those people."
For most people not seeking the biggest Cirques or Celine, half-price is the new full price. Tix4Tonight is so dominant a discounter for Strip pedestrians, it can be more of a walk to the show's real box office.
A tiny booth on the sidewalk outlying Bally's seems irrelevant by comparison. Labeled "Direct Show Tickets," it's run by Caesars Entertainment Corp. and moves what the company calls "distressed inventory" for shows on its properties without a middle-man. And it still seems like an afterthought to Tix4Tonight.
If half-price is the new full price, it's tempting to argue free is the new half-price. McCambridge will go along with this to a degree. After all, he devotes way too much of his free time to running a service called ShowTickets4Locals, which sends free-ticket offers to more than 104,000 locals daily.
Last month, McCambridge posted a long, surprisingly candid history of the venture on Facebook, one that pulls no punches in chronicling a partnership gone bad with the late Danny Gans' manager, Chip Lightman.
Today, the operation is back more to its original intentions, "more of a labor of love than it is a business," he says. Producers can paper the house for many reasons: a better experience for the paid customers, improving bar revenue or selling merchandise.
However, "if you start a show and this becomes your business model, I'm going to talk you out of it very quickly," he says. "I'm just something that helps them out."
After all, there's really nothing that can be the new free.
Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com
or 702-383-0288.
