Is it likely that I could get a single ticket to Wicked if I walked up to the box office the day of an evening performance on a Thursday? Also, any suggestions for a great bagel diner in the village or Chelsea?

I don't know what kind of percentage chance I'd give it, but yes singles are often available. Another thought is that often people outside the theatre just before performance do have a single they want to sell. And this is one place where Craigslist seems to work. There are often "one of our party can't make it and we have one ticket to sell" ads there.

Another source for late tickets is the information center in Times Square on 7th between 46 and 47th. In mid-January, we got excellent tickets on a Friday morning for the following night.

But I'm not sure that they would get returns for a sold out show, which Wicked is. Were the seats you got there for a totally sold out show? I think your best chance really is the box office, or resale sites like Craigslist.

My daughter had checked online and said that the show was sold out, but since tickets were available, the show obviously wasn't sold out. I can't help wondering whether some tickets are held back from the online sales, or released at the last minute a la Priceline.

On a Friday morning, we inquired at the Times Square info center about tickets for Wicked for that evening's show and were offered singles at about $120 or pairs of seats at about 250. So we said, do you have anything for tomorrow night (i.e., Saturday January 12), and for about $120 each we got adjacent seats in the front row of the mezzanine. These were the first Broadway tickets we had ever bought.

TravelinAnn, I didn't realize it was Wicked tickets you were talking about getting at the Time Square center, but just thought you meant tickets for some other show. That's really great news.

We actually had gone into the info center just to get a map; we hadn't realized that they even did ticket sales and couldn't believe our luck. It felt like the magical fortune-teller booth in the movie "Big".