Based on a very strong recommendation from a certain 10-year-old, I decided to go to Midsummer Night’s Dream. So the easy thing to do — am I right? — was to go to the DTC website, pick my dates, pick my seats, and buy the tickets. On the seat selection page, there’s a neat little diagram that shows the different tiers (labelled as Area I, Area 2, etc.). This being my first time at the Wyly and having read how the layout changes from the production to production, I clicked on “best seats available.” Voila! Next page showed that I had tickets A104-A106. That was nice. Except that it didn’t tell me where A104-106 are. What does A represent?
So I called the ticket number to find out. After a interminible message (“The box office is open on Mondays from 7:20 a.m. until 7:30 a.m., on alternate Tuesdays from 2:15 a.m. until 4:07 p.m., on Jewish high holy days from 10:00 a.m. until 10:01 a.m…”), it told me to call another number. Just as I was about to hang up to call that number, it told me to dial zero to speak to a ticket agent. I hit the zero. A very nice man came on the line, and I — not, admittedly, in the best frame of mind — told him of my frustration with his web site, which, he told me, had just gone up the night before. During the course of the ensuing conversation, he also informed me — very nicely — that this ticket service was for subscribers only and I needed to call the AT&T PAC office for single-performance tickets. Memo to DTC web manager: let’s add a little note to that effect.
So I called the AT&T PAC ticket number and got a busy signal. Do businesses still have busy signals? Having given a good 15 minutes to the enterprise already, I decided to retreat and redouble my efforts later. Last night, I went to the AT&T PAC site and, after five minutes of searching, found Midsummer Night’s Dream (it’s near the bottom of “playing now”… other DTC performances are ahead of it, so at first I didn’t see it). I clicked on the “buy tickets” button. This time there was no diagram accompanying the seat selection. I again clicked on “best seats available.” Once again, the selection was A106-108, this time with an important if cryptic notation, “balc.” I do not argue with destiny. I bought the tickets.
Next time it might be simpler to just show up and try my luck.
