Tickets for 'Glengarry Glen Ross' on Broadway are reselling for as much as $1,000

Reality is imitating art in the market for tickets to “Glengarry Glen Ross,” the celebrity-stacked Broadway revival of David Mamet’s play about a cutthroat team of real estate agents doing whatever they can to get ahead.

Showgoer Ken Slazyk paid $372 each for tickets in the left orchestra last week. Seats in the same section were listed for $1,034 each on the popular resale platform Stubhub – a 178% markup.

Asked whether he was tempted to sell his seats, Slazyk said “absolutely not.”

“I’ve seen the movie, my wife’s read the play, but he doesn’t even know the story,” Slazyk said, gesturing to his son. “I told him, to me, it’s a hard movie to watch, because I’m in sales.”

Performances for the new revival, which stars Kieran Culkin as the glib and predatory sales shark Ricky Roma, Bob Odenkirk as the sad sack Shelly Levene, and comedian Bill Burr as the scheming Dave Moss, are largely sold out in the near term of its 16-week run. And ticket prices have only increased since Culkin won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor earlier this month.

In a move the play’s ruthless salesmen might admire, the resale market isn’t just responding to current demand — resellers appear to be guessing that buyers might not even check their options on official sales platforms.

For late May performances with plenty of open seats, resale listings are priced higher than comparable retail tickets. A mezzanine seat for a Wednesday afternoon matinee on May 28 was available for $245.50 including fees as of this writing, on the show’s ticket site. On Stubhub, a seller was asking $312 for a resale seat in the same exact row – a 27% markup over the available retail ticket.

“We should have resold our tickets!” showgoer Margaret Mock said in the lobby before a performance last week, when she learned about the resale prices. “Except we love Bob Odenkirk, so we’re not letting them go.”

“If some consumer has bought the ticket and is reselling it like that, that’s disturbing to hear,” said the show’s lead producer Jeffrey Richards, who also staged two previous revivals of “Glengarry Glen Ross” – the Tony-winning 2005 production starring Liev Schreiber and Alan Alda, and the 2012 production starring Al Pacino and Bobby Cannavale. “We don’t share in that.”

But it’s not just the resale market driving up ticket prices. In social media, customers report that the production’s own “dynamic pricing,” where prices adjust to demand in real time, has sent retail prices soaring.

On Reddit, one user reported paying $179 for a ticket months ago; comparable seats were now selling for $700 on the official website.

Richards, the producer, confirmed that official ticket prices do change throughout the show’s run. While there is currently no rush or lottery ticket program, 10 standing-room tickets are available for day-of purchase, for $45, if the performance is completely sold out otherwise.

Richards said that in his experience, audiences care just as much about seeing celebrities on stage as they used to — but that those celebrities cost more on a relative basis than they did in the past.

“The price of eggs is more expensive, the price of A-list actors is more expensive, “ Richards said. “The price of materials and costs for sets and for costumes is more expensive.”

A block west, where the Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal production of “Othello” had average retail ticket prices of around $339 last week, resellers are making similar gambles. A premium resale seat was listed for $1,116 when retail seats in the same section were available for $721. It beat its own record for the most any Broadway non-musical has earned in a single week, with $2.825 million in gross receipts last week, according to data from the Broadway League, an industry trade group.

“Glengarry Glen Ross” earned $1.9 million in the same week, with an average ticket price around $207.

The average price for a Broadway ticket was around $125 last season, down slightly from a high of around $128 in the 2022-23 season.

Richards said Culkin’s recent Oscar win for “Best Supporting Actor” definitely generated interest in the show.

“This ensemble is truly fantastic, they’ve been on fire since the final dress [rehearsal],” Richards said.

“But the unseen star is David Mamet who wrote this play,” Richards said. “It’s an American classic about American capitalism at its most provocative.”

The show cost $7.5 million to bring to the stage, according to publicly available financial records. Richards won’t know if it’s profitable until after the show’s run, but said “it’s looking very favorably that we will have a successful commercial engagement.”