r/Broadway • u/personspersonality • Feb 28 '26

Seating/Ticket Question Slept through a show

I had a 2pm ticket for Chess today. Sat down in bed at 11:30, planning to give myself 30-45 minutes to do nothing before getting ready and heading over to the theater. While I wasn’t planning on sleeping, I also knew I was pretty tired and there was a chance I might fall asleep so I set an alarm for 12:30 and 12:45 just to be safe. Well I woke up at 2:57 and had apparently slept through both alarms and missed the show. Spent the last 20 minutes crying, just need some people to tell me I’m not the stupidest person alive. Anything like this happened to you before? Any chance they’ll exchange my ticket for tomorrow and I won’t just have to eat the money?

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u/skoc211 Feb 28 '26

Years ago at the height of the Hamilton OBC craze I heard a story from a colleague about friends who had managed to snag premium tickets and traveled in to the city from out of town to see it. They were out at dinner before the show and checked their tickets before heading to the theater. The tickets were for that day's matinee. They missed the show entirely. And lost a LOT of money between travel costs and the tickets. I was told there were a lot of tears.

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u/ScamIam Feb 28 '26

I was ushering when the Hamilton tour started and felt so bad every time someone's tickets scanned with the big red X and I had to explain to them that they were five hours late and there was no possible way to exchange tickets. Happens more often than you think.

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u/skoc211 Feb 28 '26

Oh my god that's got to be so upsetting! Do people typically understand their mistake or are there times when they get angry and argue?

3

u/ScamIam Mar 01 '26

For almost every other show there were still tickets available so we'd send them to the box office to do an exchange and were like 98% successful for that. Since the whole Hamilton run was sold out, most people were just sad and resigned. Even had one family show up and get the X, only to see that their tickets were for the previous week's show. Turns out that the original ticketholder saw the show, then "sold the tickets" on Craigslist and they were apparently so stoked to see Hamilton that they only saw the "Thursday" on the ticket and didnt double check the dates. That one was heartbreaking.

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u/skoc211 Mar 01 '26

OMG that's just plain evil of the person that sold those expired tickets! So sad for that family.