We saw Lion King and Beauty and the Beast (Lion King is 10x better) and Rent recently (I saw Phantom in Seattle and in DC so can't really help you on the exact seats on Broadway), anyway...first off balcony is called Mezanine seating, secondly I prefer mezannine...if you get the first few rows. Reason being these shows (including Phantom) have things which occur in the audience (floor level near the orchestra) to some extent and if you are in the first few rows you don't see them as well in my opinon, but you won't miss them either. Anyway here's my fyi, if you are willing to risk not pre-purchasing your tickets walk up to the ticket booth the morning of the show you want to see and ask for cancellation tickets. Everytime we've done this we've gotten front row center mezanine tickets (i.e., unsold house tickets, these are the seats they save for the actors to give to their family, friends, or that they sell to the bigwigs and if they aren't sold they realease them the day of, they are the best seats in the house), we get them for the same price as any other mezanine seat but don't pay ticketmaster charges. You can do this for any unsold tickets, but we figure why not buy the best. Now the larger the group the harder it will be to sit together of course, but we've sat next to familes of 4 or in front of who've bought from the cancellation line as well. Of course you can't buy tickets for shows that are super popular right now like The Producers unless you are there really early and stand in line for several hours, we were 4 people short of getting those tickets, but we just walked over to the Lion King, and Bingo! so if you aren't dead set on one show, its the way to go. We'll never pre-buy tickets again.
My sister got the tickets through her company. I want to work for a company like that!
