Hamilton: ticket sales for Dublin shows break records as eager fans queue to secure seats

Dublin’s Grand Canal Dock, a cool, damp spring Friday morning. It’s 8.15am and there’s a queue already edging into the square from around the side of the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre. The early birds are out to catch the worm. That enticing “worm” is the musical phenomenon Hamilton, live on stage in Dublin for the first time a year and a half hence, and tickets are about to go on general sale.

The musical with book, music, and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, tells the story of American founding father Alexander Hamilton; it became a revolutionary theatrical moment and a cultural phenomenon since it first opened in New York in 2015, meantime winning a raft of Tonys, Oliviers and Pulitzer Prize for drama.

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Hamilton will play a nine-week season in Ireland in the 2,111-seat theatre, from September 17th next year, to November 16th. By then some 144,000 people are expected to have seen Hamilton in Ireland. After some presales on Wednesday, the doors opened – literally – for the public to choose their tickets in person in the theatre’s box office.

The last time there were queues outside the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre was long-ago pre-Covid, for Les Mis in 2019. “Theatre is back,” says general manager Stephen Faloon as he’s about to open the doors. “This is another sign of that.”

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By 11.20am on Friday there is still a steady queue outside the theatre and into the box-office. Faloon estimates sales on Friday morning have broken all their records: more than 70,000 tickets have already been sold.

There’s buzz outside among those waiting for the box-office to open. First in the queue is Andrew Dawson, who left Baldoyle at 6am and was in the queue for 6.30. “I thought people might be camping overnight,” he says. Coming early to buy his Hamilton tickets is part of “celebrating musicals as a valued art form”. He’s seen Hamilton three times already, in London, and “it wows you every time”. He’s buying tickets to take his sister during October midterm break from school in 2024. After he gets his tickets he’s heading to work in the Gaiety Theatre. He’s an independent producer, with a show Yaqui and Beal coming up in Galway Theatre Festival soon.

Also early in the queue are Sophie O’Connor and Rebecca Pasley from Limerick, who came from Kildare this morning – “She forced me to”, laughs Sophie. They’re buying tickets for a few people, 11 in all. Caroline Wilson and her daughter Abby Wilson only live around the corner, and are here to soak up the atmosphere they say – “and to avoid the Ticketmaster fee!” Buying the tickets at the box office saves the hefty per-ticket charges that Ticketmaster add to online tickets.

In the queue outside Emma Barry and her mother Gillian Barry, who’s texting work to say she’s running late, are buying tickets for Emma’s 18th birthday. Katriona Boland and Bernadette Egan have come from home around the corner, hoping to buy seven tickets between them. Cillian Lee is eating breakfast on the run, getting three tickets on his way to work at the IFSC. Another man says it’s a great buzz, though he’s worried they’ll be competing with the online sales when they open at 9am. As fans wait patiently in the queue, theatre staff bring out some Hamilton-themed cupcakes for them. In the foyer after buying tickets, there are balloons, the soundtrack – hip-hop, jazz, R & and Broadway – is playing and people pose for photos against a show backdrop, taking photos home after a successful early morning’s work.

All the tickets for the nine-week run have now been released for sale; “when they’re gone, they’re absolutely gone”, says Faloon. By the end of today “we expect to have sold out the Aviva [50,000 seats], if not Croke Park [80,000 seats]“. Later in the morning, Faloon predicts they will in fact have outsold Croke Park capacity by the end of the day.

Tickets start at €36.50, school group tickets are €25, and the dearest tickets are €90 (that’s before Ticketmaster add-ons for online tickets). He observes Hamilton’s young audiences are building new audiences for live theatre. They make an effort to keep tickets affordable, says Faloon. Prices are less than for the show in London and Broadway, where at their peak New York tickets were selling for $600. It’s a large-scale, lavish show. “You see every cent of the ticket on the stage.”

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With a long-running production in the West End and on Broadway, another cast and crew is currently being put together for Hamilton’s first tour out of London. Some 3,000 performers applied to audition for the colour-blind casting of the new production, so it will take some time to form the team, Faloon says. It will play in Manchester and Edinburgh before coming to Dublin.

Faloon has been working on getting the show to Dublin for six years; originally he’d hoped it would be here in 2021 but Covid delayed the long process. He finally landed the show through a strategy of “pleading and blackmailing!“, he jokes.