Top ‘Hamilton’ premium ticket on Broadway pushed to record $849

NEW YORK – Be prepared to fork over a lot more Hamiltons to see the Broadway smash “Hamilton.” Producers have pushed the top premium seat price up to a record $849.

The previous high for premium ticket prices was $477 for the best seats at “The Book of Mormon.” “Hamilton” will easily shatter that mark, an attempt to cut scalpers out of the resale business.

But lead producer Jeffrey Sellers also has opened access for people unable to spend hundreds by increasing the number of last-minute digital lottery seats for $10 – or a Hamilton – from 21 to 46 people.

“It’s not a token amount. Forty-six tickets a night is a lot of tickets,” Sellers said Thursday. “On an annual basis, 19,000 people will receive an opportunity to see ‘Hamilton’ in the first two rows for $10.”

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop-flavored biography about the first U.S. treasury secretary is the hardest ticket to get on Broadway, making close to $2 million a week.

“We know that scalpers have been buying our tickets – often in illegal ways – and reselling them for four or five or six times their face value. And we know that all of those dollars are going to those usurious brokers and they’re not going to the very people that create the play, perform the play or work on the play every single day,” Sellers said.

Sellers said his team settled on $849 to “take the air out of those very brokers who are using our tickets to make a killing” and put that money back in the show.

According to the plan, a total of 200 seats will sell for $849 at the Broadway box office, while 1,075 will be listed between $179 and $199. The plan goes into effect in late January.