Very pleased to make my debut in Esquire with this piece that made pretty good use of my skills as an anthropologist (wink wink). The website link here.
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Of 'Sold-out' Shows, a Ticket Scam, and the Into the Woods Lottery
Four months before its August 7 opening night, Theater Group Asia’s (TGA) Into the Woods announced that all of its 24 scheduled performances were already sold out. The message seemed clear: Those still without a ticket might as well forget about seeing this musical starring Lea Salonga.
For some people, however, that all changed on opening day itself, when TGA suddenly announced the availability of what it termed "student rush lottery tickets." According to the company’s publicity material, 20 students would be granted the chance to purchase discounted tickets at the box office two-and-a-half hours before every performance, with each student allowed to buy a maximum of two tickets.
Theatre Group Asia's Facebook post on August 7, 5 p.m.: "If you're dreaming of a night at the theater, this is your chance to score tickets to Into the Woods tickets at a special price! THE LOTTERY STARTS TONIGHT and will be open every show! Swipe for full mechanics and see you at the Samsung Performing Arts Theater. Cash transactions only!!," the announcement said.
Publicity material by TGA, including a sold-out declaration from March 30, Facebook.
Ticket rush or ticket lotteries are nothing new in the theater world: They have long been standard practice for Broadway (New York) and West End (London) productions. These rush promotions and lotteries more or less occur daily, selling a limited number of seats per performance at markedly discounted prices. According to Playbill.com, which compiles a regularly updated list of such promotions for currently running Broadway shows, lotteries are now mainly conducted online, while rush tickets are sold either online or onsite. At the outset, then, it wasn’t really clear whether TGA’s "student rush lottery" was going to be a rush promotion or a lottery. As I eventually discovered, it also operated quite differently from the lotteries on Broadway, where names are drawn at random from a pool of entrants (as in an actual lottery)—and lining up is not necessary.
Students' Experience at Theatre Group Asia's Lottery Tickets for Into the Woods
This was how Cessna, a medical technology student from the University of Santo Tomas, ended up watching the show. The morning of August 29, Cessna was first in line for the lottery at the Samsung Performing Arts Theater (SPAT), Circuit Makati, where Into the Woods was scheduled to play its fifth-to-the-last performance later that evening.
Cessna described herself as a theater fan; though yet to see a show by any of Manila’s many theater companies, she’d caught the touring productions of Hamilton, Miss Saigon, The Lion King, and Cats at The Theatre at Solaire. Her familiarity with Into the Woods was limited to the 2014 film adaptation starring Meryl Streep: "I’m kind of going into this show blind," she said.
Cessna had long given up on ever seeing this Into the Woods, having failed to snag a ticket during the public sale earlier this year. Then, she saw a TikTok video by someone who’d seen the show; the caption went something like: “POV: You’re lucky to get this seat for 750 [pesos]. Such a steal.” That’s how she knew of the lottery. Determined to secure a ticket and watch Salonga perform live for the first time (“the great singer that she is!”), Cessna arrived at Circuit Makati at 8:40 a.m. on the 29th (she didn’t have class that day) and hunkered down outside SPAT for the eight-and-a-half-hour wait until the box office opened.
Twenty minutes later, Elora arrived at 9 a.m., second in line, foldable chair in tow. A media studies student at the University of the Philippines Diliman, Elora, too, had tried—unsuccessfully—to buy tickets during the public sale, and found out about the lottery only a few days earlier on TikTok.
Elora wouldn’t call herself a theater super fan, though she’s currently into the musicals Beetlejuice and Waitress. "I’m more of a concertgoer," she said. Apart from having caught the musical Six when GMG Productions brought it to Solaire last year, she’d yet to see any local production, even the ones staged by Dulaang Unibersidad ng Pilipinas (DUP) at her school. Her younger sister was the real Into the Woods fan, and the reason she was camping out at the lottery line. "I also want to learn more about the theater scene in Manila," Elora said. "I have nothing to lose [from lining up here], anyway."
In contrast, Hannah, who arrived at 10:30 a.m. and was sixth in line, had already seen the show, having bought a ticket for P5,500 during the presale period using her own allowance. A medical student from Bulacan, she said she was lining up for the lottery because the production was "worth watching [again] talaga," and "it’s rare to have Lea Salonga onstage" in the Philippines. Her first time at the theater was only last year: GMG Productions’ Miss Saigon at Solaire; TGA's Into the Woods was her second.
While she knew of the currently running or upcoming local productions like the Philippine Educational Theater Association's (PETA) Walang Aray Tanghalang Pilipino’s Pingkian, she only wished she could stretch her budget to be able to watch these other shows.
It’s interesting, to say the least, how Cessna, Elora, and Hannah all arrived way earlier than the scheduled time of arrival suggested by TGA. In its publicity material for the lottery, TGA instructed: “No need to come early. Lines open only at the posted times.” That meant 12:00 p.m. for matinee shows and 5:00 p.m. for evening shows.
However, all three of them separately stated that one could not—and should not—trust those suggested times.
They had experienced lining up for extended periods of time to buy tickets before: Elora spent at least three hours in line for One Direction concert tickets when the now-defunct boy band came to the Philippines. Cessna was a veteran of anime and streamer conventions, and had once fallen in line at 4 a.m. for a meet-and-greet at SMX Convention Center, Pasay City. Hannah camped out for two days (“I didn’t sleep properly”) to secure a ticket to the American singer Olivia Rodrigo’s concert at the Philippine Arena in 2024.
But it wasn’t just these past experiences that prompted the three to spend more than half the day at Circuit in order to see Into the Woods. Hannah had seen the Instagram photos and reels of the long lines of lottery ticket hopefuls in the last several days; of people going, “It’s only 3 p.m., but I’m already number X in line.” In fact, Hannah said, “It’s ironic that [TGA itself] (re)posted such videos [on Instagram and Facebook stories],” in direct contradiction of its own instructions.
In Elora’s case, she had actually tried to score lottery tickets the day before. Arriving at 2:30 p.m., she found the line terribly long already. “I thought 2:30 was a reasonable and early enough time to arrive, but when I got here, I thought, okay, I’m not even going to fall in line anymore. I’ll just arrive as early as possible tomorrow.”
Cessna said she had also seen the videos on Facebook, “of people talking about how they tried to get lottery tickets, but the line was already quite long by lunchtime.”
Moreover, when she passed by SPAT a few days earlier to inquire about the lottery mechanics, the theater staff even advised her to arrive as early as she could because "the line was usually already long by 12 noon."
"I never believed those instructions. It’s all on Reddit," Hannah said, referring to people talking about their actual experiences with the lottery. A simple Google search confirms this.
Lining Up for the So-Called Lottery First-Hand
I had a similar experience with Cessna. When I arrived at Circuit at 4:35 p.m. the day before these interviews were conducted, the line already stretched from right outside the theater entrance on the ground floor to the adjacent drop-off curb, like an extremely flattened, elongated letter C. Later, at the box office, the chirpy attendant said to me, "Agáhan niyo talaga, sir." Come extremely early.
Thus, I found myself next in line to Hannah that morning of the 29th. It was only 11:30 a.m., and I’d initially planned to run some errands first before hitting the line. Just two hours later, the number of ticket hopefuls had ballooned to 36. By 4:30 p.m., 30 minutes before the box office was set to open, I counted around 108 people in line, not including the ones I’d seen lining up for a brief while before leaving prematurely.
The line outside the theater at 4:30 p.m.
Throughout the afternoon, Hannah and I shared the same thought: Why wouldn’t the theater staff just tell the people way further down the line that they were actually wasting their time? At some point, someone from inside the theater even came out to inspect the lengthy line and said to the crowd, "I hope you all get tickets today."
Because this was how the lottery actually panned out on both days I was there: At 5 p.m., everyone in line was allowed into the building by the guards. We ascended the several flights of escalators before arriving at the theater lobby on the fifth floor. There, the line was compressed into a more compact, sinuous version of itself in front of the box office. The office attendants then commenced ticket selling in the exact order that people were lined up. Each person was asked if they wanted to buy one or two tickets, as advertised—but only one buyer needed to be a student (a current ID or proof of enrollment had to be presented). Both tickets, if one decided to buy two, were sold at the same price for cash payments only. Very quickly, and rather predictably, then, the day’s measly ticket allocation was exhausted. There was no genuine lottery to speak of.
After all ‘lottery’ tickets had been sold, the attendants asked the remaining, sizable crowd still in line to write down their names on a sheet of paper, still in the order that they were lined up. At 7:15 p.m., while the regular audience (and lucky 'lottery' buyers) filed into the theater to take their seats, a sort of last-minute ticket selling unfolded at the box office. On both nights, the attendants called out the names on the ersatz waitlist in order. The first few names were given the option to buy the unsold wheelchair- designated seats in the theater at their regular price (cashless modes of payment now allowed); when these extremely limited seats were sold out, everybody else was told to just try their luck again.
During the waitlist selling at the box office, I observed a mother scrambling to pull out a few more one-thousand-peso bills from her wallet, evidently having planned to spend far less on tickets for her and her teenager. But even the actual, faux-lottery itself was vague with pricing and seat availability. The publicity material only stated: "partial view seats available." One learned of the specifics elsewhere, such as Reddit threads. Along with several other people in line that day, I ended up scoring orchestra center seats originally priced at P6,000 for just P2,000 apiece. Whatever happened to that much-ballyhooed "sold out" declaration?
Inside the theater, with lottery tickets just about to run out (above), and later on during the 'waitlist' selling (below).
To be clear, Into the Woods wasn’t the first theater production in Manila to sell out its run before it had even opened. Just last year, PETA’s One More Chance, the Musical sold out its entire three-month run ahead of its April 2024 premiere. But the sheer star power attached to Into the Woods arguably set it apart from other shows: Its cast boasted Salonga, Eugene Domingo, Mark Bautista, and Broadway imports Arielle Jacobs and Josh dela Cruz. The massive public attention it generated was thus unsurprising.
Theater Ticket Scams
Unfortunately, it was also buzzy enough to attract the attention of scammers—a problem One More Chance likewise encountered. Into the Woods' sold-out status could only have amplified the public’s desperation, rendering more people vulnerable to scammers claiming to sell tickets to the show.
Athena and Avi, both college students on term break at De La Salle University, were just two of the presumably many victims of scammers. The morning of the 29th, they were fourth and fifth in line for ‘lottery’ tickets. But they had previously lost P5,000 each to a scammer.
“We were desperate to get tickets because [Ticketworld] kept malfunctioning during the original selling period, so we failed to score tickets then,” Athena said. “I found someone in a ticket-selling group on Facebook. That person provided me with lots of supposed proof, like IDs and photos of tickets with blurred-out details. We were really skeptical, but they just kept bombarding us with more ‘proof’, including screenshots of people supposedly vouching for them.”
Avi continued: "We only realized we’d been scammed when we didn’t receive the tickets that were supposed to be emailed to us. And the seller’s Facebook account disappeared real quick as well. There’s no trace of it now."
Still, they were determined to spend more of their own savings as students to see the show. "[Into the Woods] was the first musical I was introduced to as a child," Athena said, "and now’s my chance to see my first live show. It’s our last chance to get tickets." The two literally didn’t sleep the previous night and had arrived around 10 a.m. to line up—though they’d also wrongly assumed there was going to be a matinee performance that day.
Curious to see how scammers operated, I had previously contacted two such Facebook accounts in one of the many "buy-and-sell" groups earlier last month. One was named Shane Aliyah; the other, Lyka Dela Rosa. When I asked if they had a ticket for one date in August, they replied within seconds of each other. "Yes po. Sending [tickets] through e-mail po. Legit seller po. Gcash payment." It was as if they shared a script, or a brain and an e-wallet. They were selling different seats in the balcony section; interestingly, though, they were selling seats originally priced at P2,800 for P2,500. Lyka said I could pay P1,000 first, then the rest after receipt of the ticket; Shane said I could pay half the price first so it would be "safe [for] both of us." "Will add password for security purposes [to the emailed ticket]. Too many scammers," Shane said.
After providing her my address, I received an email from Shane—only her email name was Ashley Summer. The message had a password-encrypted photograph of a ticket. When I told her I was discontinuing the transaction because it was too shady, she said, "Why po [crying eyes emoji]. Legit seller here po. God bear me witness. This is 100% legit. You won’t regret transacting with me po." Then she sent me a screencap of a Ticketworld confirmation purchase for an altogether different date than the one I had asked about.
It’s fascinating to see the kind of informal economy spawned by the mad dash to obtain a ticket to Into the Woods last month, even in spite of—or maybe especially because of—the official statement that there were none available anymore. (In this vein, I know of two fellow theater journalists who each bought their ticket from different secondary sources; one was from a fundraiser for a school’s alumni association.)
That day at the 'lottery' line, I couldn’t help thinking, with a tinge of secondhand envy, how wonderful it would be if only the likes of Pingkian or Walang Aray, or Elecktra at The Mirror Studio in Makati City, or Quomodo Desolata Es? Isang Dalamhati at Ateneo de Manila University also enjoyed this level of insane attention and patronage. Behind me, four senior high school girls from the University of Santo Tomas scrambled to seek last-minute permissions from their parents, having mistakenly thought they were lining up for matinee tickets. At some point, Hannah put on her earphones to attend an epidemiology class on Zoom. A pack of Fox’s candies was passed around. The closer it got to 5 p.m., the longer the line became, its 'latecomers' clearly unaware they were lining up for nothing.
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