Students were greeted with a “Wicked” surprise at the Norris Box Office on Monday when they discovered that tickets to the Wizard of Oz-inspired musical had already sold out after going on sale three days early.
Tickets for the Nov. 1 event, sponsored by the Center for Student Involvement, were scheduled to be sold Monday but were accidentally made available Friday after a mix-up by box office management.
“It was completely my mistake,” said Frank Zambrano, cash operations manager at Norris University Center. Zambrano said he put the tickets on sale prematurely after he confused the “Wicked” trip with the upcoming Gulf Coast benefit concert sponsored by the Hurricane Katrina task force.
After lining up Monday morning and waiting for up to half an hour, students were informed that tickets had already sold out and asked to add their names to a waiting list.
“I wouldn’t say we were rioting,” said Weinberg sophomore Veronica House, who waited in line with roommate Heather Belcher. “But I think we were outspoken about our problems. And they wouldn’t answer our questions, which just made us more mad.”
The first sixty students on the waiting list will be able to purchase tickets for a third trip on a date yet to be determined, said Judith Cooper, assistant director at CSI. More than seventy students have already signed up, she said.
For angry students, the rain check might not suffice. “We’re all really busy this year,” said Belcher, a Communication sophomore. The new date, she said, might not work with her schedule. “It just depends on what day they pick.”
Weinberg sophomore Susannah Harris purchased a ticket Friday after her roommate found out about the sale through the Norris Web site. After picking up her own ticket, she passed on the information to her sorority sisters at Alpha Phi.
“I think the majority of that last 20 or 30 tickets are people from my sorority,” Harris said. “There must be people out there who aren’t very pleased.”
“Wicked,” a Tony-nominated Broadway musical starring Ana Gasteyer, Communication ’89, tells the life-story of the Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West. CSI offered $19 tickets to the show – full-price seats usually run between $27.50 and $77. The musical is playing at Chicago’s Ford Center For the Performing Arts through April 30.
This will be the first CSI Chicagoland trip to be offered three separate times, Cooper said. The show “seems to be selling by word of mouth before we even advertise,” she said. “I really think because everyone knows the story of the Wizard of Oz, it’s a part of their childhood.”
Despite the show’s popularity, CSI will not sponsor a fourth trip. The center does not have enough money in its budget to continue subsidizing ticket costs and paying for transportation, Cooper said.
“It’s weird; it’s one of those programs where the more successful you are, the more money you lose,” she said.
Cooper had her own solution for disappointed students: “Maybe it should be NU day at ‘Wicked,'” she said, half-joking. “If we have enough money we should just buy out the whole theater one night.”
Reach Jordan Weissmann at [email protected].
