A Wicked Evening

David and I had no real plans for Saturday other then a vague "we'll do something in Portland" thinking we'd probably wind up seeing a movie in a theater which is a big treat these days. We were talking about our weekend plans (or non-plans) with our friends at the wedding and learned about an awesome opportunity to see Wicked for a reasonable price. Apparently if you show up 2.5 hours before the show starts (5pm for evening shows) you can put your name in a hat for a last minute ticket lottery. The only requirement is that you be there to put your name in the hat between 5 and 5:30pm, have cash for the tickets on hand, and a photo id. We'd looked into buying Wicked tickets earlier and decided against it because of the price but for $25 apiece we thought it was worth a shot.

We got to Portland a little after noon and parked the car at the Lloyd Center and browsed the mall a little to kill some time. We watched the ice skaters and ate Steak Escape and I got a new pair of khakis that I've been needing for $10.99 at Old Navy. After we got bored of the mall we dropped my new pants off at the car and got on Max to go downtown. Have I ever mentioned how awesome Fareless Square is? We use it any time we need to go downtown to avoid the parking fees and confusing one ways. Anyways, we got to the Keller Auditorium in the afternoon to confirm the ticket lottery details and then hunted down a Washington Mutual bank to get cash (the iphone totally saved our bacon!) before returning to stand in line. We were the first ones in line but by the time they started pulling names out of the hat we estimated there were 70 people vying for the 20 available tickets. We were getting nervous that our evening plans might not turn out the way we hoped they would when David's name was called! He was the second to last name to be pulled and we were super excited when we went to buy the tickets and found out they were even together since we were pretty sure we'd have separate seats. We went for dinner at the Rock Bottom Brewery before heading back for the show at 7pm.

Our seats were in row D which happens to be the sixth row back from the stage. We were pretty far to the right so we missed a little action that happened back stage right but all the main action happened in the front of the stage which we could see really well. We even saw the spit fly out of the actor's mouths at times. We looked up the cost of the tickets when we got home and they were $93 apiece! No way would we have paid that, the back row of the second balcony (as far away as you can get) were the tickets we had considered and deemed to expensive at over $50 a pop. Here's a picture David took of me in front of the orchestra pit so you can see how close to the stage we were. It was awesome!

The show was really good and both David and I really enjoyed it. Neither of us were terribly impressed with the music but the quality of acting and singing was excellent. My favorite character was Glinda, she was absolutely hilarious!