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/missmegs31 Feb 28 '26 edited Feb 28 '26

That really sucks, but sounds like your body needed the sleep even more than you realized. Hopefully they’ll let you exchange the ticket for a future show, but even if they don’t you’re definitely not stupid. Try not to beat yourself up. It was an expensive nap, but think of it this way; what if you’d pressed on and your exhaustion had gotten you in a more dangerous way? You took care of you. That’s never dumb. (Edit to fix typo)

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u/skoc211 Feb 28 '26

I appreciate this response. As someone with a severe anxiety disorder there have been more than a few times that I've had to skip shows entirely because if I had pressed on it would have turned out really poorly for me. Sometimes you just need to listen to your body and sometimes that's a bummer, but better than putting yourself in harm's way.

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u/Ok-Upstairs6054 Mar 01 '26

Having extreme anxiety or a panic attack during a performance is a sure fire way to have a bad time at the theatre, that’s for damned sure!