A-C-E-ING IT

Winning isn't everything, but the buzz it delivers sure takes some beating...

A couple of decades ago, a couple of dozen West End ticket agents were flown to New York to see a show.  These transatlantic showcasing/scouting trips were quite frequent back then, and, as usual, we were wined and dined and given presentations from the show’s producers and marketing teams, while simultaneously juggling jet lag and our GMT workloads. As was also traditional in those days, the first-half show-reviews were shared on the sidewalk at the ‘Two Ciggies Interval Forum.’  Here one of our party gushed enthusiastically (he’s now hugely and rightly successful btw) while others sucked silently on their B & H and exchanged encrypted looks. You have to understand that this immensely fortunate group had seen everything (every major Musical, Play and Playsical on both sides of the puddle and their UK and Ireland touring iterations) but we had never seen anything quite like this show before.

After the show, we were invited to drinks with the cast and producers at one of Broadway’s swankiest steak joints.  As Team London were shepherded into the lavishly catered private dining room, I snagged a ticket agent friend, dragged him onto the main floor of the restaurant, and requested a table for two. 

“But there’s food in there…” he protested, “and free booze. And the cast.”

“Trust me,” I told him, waving a waiter over to us. "I've got this."

“Garçon," I addressed the resting actor/supermodel with a suitably theatrical flourish, "what is the largest steak on the menu tonight?”

“That one, Sir,” he pointed proudly in the direction of a huge hunk of beef dominating the refrigerated display cases, “But it is one hundred dollars plus tax.” 

“Perfect,” I replied. “We’ll take it to share. With a small green salad.”

My friend, a notorious carnivore, was partly appeased by my selection, but unfortunately there was only a glass wall between us and the glamorous goings-on in the private dining room.

“Look at them all, Dave," he pleaded. "And we’re stuck out here. Let’s go in, yes?”

Our steak arrived and was positioned on the table so we could attack from either end.  We had barely got past the first couple of inches when one of the show’s producers came to talk to us.

“What did you think of the show, Guys???” he beamed like there was only one possible answer.

 “Mmmmmm,” I beamed back, my jaws fully engaged in chewing, and gave him a ‘thumbs up.’

“Mmmmmm,” my friend agreed, his mandibles similarly employed.

“Great!” the producer enthused, “enjoy your steak.”

We were still hard at it when he resurfaced ten minutes later, but this time our non-verbal ‘review’ seemed to do the trick.  We breathed out, very relieved.

Next week that show, Wicked, celebrates two decades in London’s West End.  I have now seen it over twenty times, and the firm I was working for back then was responsible for selling several thousand tickets in the critical first couple of years of the run alone. Even more importantly, we were promoting the show almost exclusively to UK regional theatregoers (by packaging with London hotels, rail, etc.) so within weeks the positive word of mouth would spread from Land's End to John O' Groats. Two statements stand out in my mind from those early days supporting the show:

1)    “We are the most anal (‘micromanaging’) show in London.”  That was quite a boast, considering the other West End contenders for that particular title, but the point was rammed home when I was waiting to greet the 600+ Press and Industry VIP guests that we’d invited during the previews.  There was a train strike. And I seem to recall it was raining. But there was that same producer from the steak joint, standing on the theatre steps, and asking his head of marketing every ten minutes how many of our guests had yet to collect? 

2)    “We are not The Lion King.”

With 2,328 seats to sell per performance, for roughly 415 performances per year, Wicked would always listen to, and actively encourage, our more ‘left field’ suggestions for getting bums on seats; the innovative (and sometimes frankly outrageous) tactics that other, more established shows, didn’t feel the need to deploy.

But back to that steak joint.

Both my ticket agent friend and I knew that the success of our respective companies (and therefore our livelihoods, and those of our colleagues) was ultimately dependent on the energy and ingenuity which we could bring to the sales and marketing of all our core West End inventory, eight shows a week, fifty-two weeks a year. And to do that, we needed to compellingly target each individual show’s key customer segments, and promising outliers, rather than actually being part of all those demographics ourselves. But it actually went a lot, lot deeper than that.  As practically every pulse-bearing/beating/racing member of The Business of Pleasure will understand, my friend and I were committed to the Sacred Quest of winning a show an audience, and we both knew, from years of experience, that the more potentially demanding the challenge, the more satisfying would be the ultimate success. A phenomenon that any gamer will understand, as the introduction to a 2022 paper on the subject suggests:

‘While much of modern, bureaucratised society is geared towards reducing uncertainty, games are strange pockets of social life designed to heighten it -much to the attraction of players and spectators entering these pockets.  This crucially includes uncertain success. Some scholars like Caillois, 2001, went so far to define games and play as ‘uncertain activity.’ Doubt must remain until the end… an outcome known in advance, with no possibility of error or surprise, … is incompatible with the nature of play.’  This view is also common among contemporary game designers. To quote Elias et al., 2012): “if we had to pick one ingredient that was necessary… for something to be a game, uncertainty in outcome would probably be it…’

Adding later:

‘…One key question for games research is why people seek out and enjoy uncertain success. While current theories see gameplay fuelled by multiple motives, they typically explain the appeal of optimal challenge with intrinsic motivations of achievement, competence, or effectance (ACE).  Broadly, ACE theories hold that people need and therefore seek out the positively valenced experience of effectively causing intended change in the world; We enjoy succeeding or doing well at something…”

After our mega-steak, we went to Marie’s Crisis for a musical-theatre sing-song around the piano.**

And while neither of us actually expected that songs from Wicked would be sung around that same piano tonight, twenty years later, we would both, in our different ways, do everything humanly possible to make that a possibility.

To give it the best chance.

To ACE it, good and proper!

DT

3rd September 2026

*Mastering uncertainty: A predictive processing account of enjoying uncertain success in video game play. Sebastian Deterding, Marc Malmdorf Andersen, Julian Kliverstein, Mark Miller Frontiers in Psychology, July 26, 2022.

 **Having demolished half a cow (on top of a pre-show dinner) my friend insisted that we stop off for a burger on our walk back from Marie’s because he was “starving.”