Photo by Carol Rosegg

While getting tickets to the Shakespeare Theatre’s Free For All performance of Twelfth Night has been made easier through a new online ticketing system (or, as the City Paper learned, just asking your councilmember), some people worry they’ve been left behind by the random lottery draw of ticketing. It’s a drawback for groups of people who want to go to the show together, because the lottery only permits two tickets per winner. If a group of six friends want to go together, there’s no guarantee that all of them will win tickets to the same show.

Lindsay Mady, the theater’s publicist, said that shouldn’t discourage groups from trying to attend the show. There’s another way: They can come down to the standby line together and wait for the no-shows.

“Our standby line has been successful,” said Mady. “The lottery has swayed people to try another day, instead of coming by for the standby line, so we’ve been getting most people in.”

Mady says that management was aware of this potential pitfall for groups of people that want to enjoy the show together, but went ahead with the online lottery anyway, because of the other benefits it brought to Free For All. Though she can't estimate the number of no-shows, she notes that since fewer people are trying the standby line, it also queues up later: “Closer to six,” she says, “So they won’t be standing there long.”