I have evidence that I went to a Major League Baseball game 26 years ago, and the next day saw a famed Broadway musical on tour in Chicago, at a famed venue. But I can’t really drag much of either experience out of the twisty byways of memory when I think about them now. I can make some logical reconstructions, though.
I went to one or maybe two Cubs games a year in the late 1980s at Wrigley Field, and one Sox game at the old Comiskey Park. Each time I went with some PR people that I knew. Enjoyable, and I’m glad that I got to go, especially to Comiskey, since it was demolished in 1991.
Still, I have no particular memory of the June 10, 1989 game. Data about the game is easy enough to look up, though. The Cardinals took it 6-0 and the game lasted about two and a half hours starting at 3:05 pm (night games, played at Wrigley since August 8, 1988, were still pretty rare). The temp at the start time was 62 F. and it was windy. One of those annoying early June days in Chicago when it isn’t quite as warm as June should be. We had a few of those last week.
Joe Magrane pitched for the Cardinals and Greg Maddux and others pitched for the Cubs. I was one of more than 38,000 in attendance. I probably ate a hot dog and drank a beer, but not even the most insanely complete compilation of baseball stats can tell me for sure.
The ticket, Terrace Aisle 235, Row 13, Seat 101, cost all of $7. In current money, that’s $13.36, according to the handy BLS CPI inflation calculator. So I checked the official ticketing site of the Cubs today to look up an equivalent game and its ticket prices — June 13, 2015, when the Cubs are playing the Reds. It’s too much trouble to pin down the exact current price for that specific seat, but no need to anyway. All of the Terrace Reserved seats range from $41 to $59. What’s your excuse, MLB?
The next day I went to the splendid Auditorium Theatre for a matinee of Les Miserables. My girlfriend at the time wanted to go, so I took her. I remember bits and pieces of some remarkable stagecraft — barricades, seems like — but not much else besides a feeling of not caring for it all that much. Tickets were $30, which is the equivalent of $57.24 now, up in the balcony.
It’s a little harder to make a direct comparison to today’s prices, since Les Miserables isn’t playing at the Auditorium Theatre in 2015. Currently the Royal Ballet is doing Don Quixote there; tickets range from about $36 to $146 for the matinee on the 14th. The cheap seats are of course in the balcony, and at a discount to 1989, but then again, I suspect a big-deal Broadway show like Les Mis would command the same, and probably more, than back then. Just a hunch.
Over the years I’ve discovered that big-deal Broadway musicals aren’t really to my taste. Les Mis was probably part of that discovery. I’d rather see a regular play in a small theater. I’m pretty much in agreement with the reviewer Tom Boeker, who wrote in The Reader in 1989: “At last, two years after it opened in New York, it’s come to Chicago. It’s an event, a spectacle, a dress occasion, an opera, and a musical. It’s Les Miserables!
“I don’t know. I don’t get it… So you can see Les Miserables has everything: sentiment, revolution, and romance with a capital R for Romanticism. If you were going to see only one musical in your life, you might as well see this one and get the bloody thing over with. To inflate a quote from the film short Hardware Wars, ‘You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll kiss 40 bucks good-bye.’ “