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Wait For It: Broadway's hottest ticket 'Hamilton' comes to the Pantages — in a year-and-a-half
Lin-Manuel Miranda performs at "Hamilton" Broadway Opening Night at Richard Rodgers Theatre on Aug. 6, 2015 in New York City.
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Broadway's hottest musical since "The Book of Mormon" is coming to Los Angeles. Lin-Manuel Miranda's "Hamilton" hits the Pantages stage — but not until August of 2017.
The show premiered off-Broadway in early 2015 to a completely sold-out run before hitting the Great White Way's Richard Rodgers Theatre in July and officially opening in August. Combined with the Rodgers being owned by the same company as the Pantages, the show coming out west isn't much of a surprise, but the Pantages announced the exact dates on Tuesday.
The show's lead producer, Jeffrey Seller, said that San Francisco and L.A. were chosen for the tour due to those cities previously showing support for other popular musicals like "Wicked," according to the New York Times.
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“We make these decisions based on the size of the market and the power of the market to sell tickets for long periods of time,” Seller said, according to the Times. “Both cities have accommodated shows for even longer stays.”
"Hamilton" has already grossed more than $44 million at the Rodgers, with close to 300,000 in attendance so far, according to statistics from the Broadway League, with what the Pantages describes as "unprecedented advance box office sales." The show is so hot that the attendance in New York is actually above capacity, with recent weeks running at 102 percent of capacity as more than 10,000 attend each week.
Season tickets that include "Hamilton" are available now, if you want to guarantee a spot without dealing with the rush for individual tickets, but you'll have to wait if you want to pick and choose which shows you want to see. Still, a number of other hit shows are also heading to the Pantages in the new season they announced Tuesday, including the other recent musical cultural phenomenon, 2011's "The Book of Mormon," making a return engagement. The season also includes "Hedwig and the Angry inch," "The King and I," "Finding Neverland," "An American in Paris" and "The Bodyguard."
Musical tours often feature different casts, though Miranda played the lead in his last award-winning musical "In The Heights" — and reprised the role when that one toured to L.A. So, cross your fingers, everyone.
Another sign of the show's amazing popularity: The cast has been putting on shows for those hoping to score last-minute tickets on the streets outside the theater — or at least, they were, until the #Ham4Ham shows and the ticket lottery became so popular that they were interfering with safety, so they're both moving to digital-only. (The #Ham4Ham shows already are — the digital lottery was too popular for the servers to keep up with in their first attempt, so that's still in the works.)
If you can't "Wait For It" but don't want to head out to New York City, the San Francisco dates start in March 2017. The show already announced that it would tour to Chicago starting in September 2016, which is separate from the West Coast tour, according to the New York Times.
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"Hamilton" was in the works, like many musicals, for quite a while. Miranda performed the show's opening song back in 2009 for a White House poetry jam.
Hamilton at the White House poetry jam
Obama told the story of that original performance of the song and then finally seeing the show live to Jon Stewart in a behind-the-scenes video taped when Stewart was hosting "The Daily Show."
The show, inspired by the 2004 biography of Hamilton by Ron Chernow, runs at the Pantages from Aug. 11, 2017 through Dec. 30, 2017.
Listen to the full "Hamilton" original cast recording here:
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