By Mike Napolitano

Some students looking to buy tickets for “An Evening With Jon Stewart” Wednesday night experienced a bad sense of deja-vu.

Reminiscent of last year’s Springfest ticket issues through the myNEU portal, the myTickets tab could not handle the initial rush of buyers, letting only the lucky get to the purchase page before it crashed for the night.

As of press time, it was unclear when tickets would be available again, said Sam Peisner, president of the Council for University Programs (CUP), one of the event’s sponsors.

“It kind of jammed up because everybody was going on at once,” Peisner said to The News last night. “People have only been able to get tickets through the cracks, basically.”

Peisner said he did not know how many tickets had been sold but he did not believe tickets had sold out. However, the Northeastern Tickets website, available through the myTickets tab, displayed an error message saying tickets were not currently available.

This ticket purchasing system was created with the potential for a big rush of ticket-buyers in mind.

“This is going to make it run a lot more smoothly,” Peisner said in an interview with The News last Sunday.

Despite the setbacks, Peisner still said last night that the new system is better than NUPay.

“If this was on NUPay, no tickets would have been sold. What happened at Springfest last year doesn’t really compare to what happened now,” he said, citing the amount of traffic to the site. “The numbers just must be ridiculous.”

Peisner said the only thing people can do is wait for the system to start working and stop reloading the ticket page constantly.

“We got to ask people to sit tight, sit back and chill out with the refreshing, because that’s what’s causing the problem,” Peisner said.

Sophomore communication studies major Audrey Bigham said she was not discouraged by the website’s downtime.

“I do plan to try again, I actually just tried a couple of minutes ago,” she said last night. “They should have gone about this a different way. Obviously the method that they came up with isn’t any better.”

Peisner said both CUP and the Resident Student Association (RSA) had been planning the show since the beginning of summer.

“It’s really been worth it this week just seeing people’s excitement about it,” he said. “[Stewart] was our first choice far and away, and we couldn’t be prouder about the whole thing.”

Tuesday, Peisner told The News there was a strong possibility they would sell out the first night. He said at that time he did not expect to have any tickets left by Friday.

“We expected them to sell out within the first day definitely,” Homecoming Committee Comedy Chair Garrett Marques said Wednesday night.

Cat Armato, vice president for programming for RSA, said she expected the show to sell out, but not as quickly as last year’s Springfest, which listed only 3,000 tickets for sale to students.

“We already have like 1,600 people in the Facebook group [JON STEWART LIVE IN MATTHEWS ARENA!],” she said Tuesday. “There’s about 5,500 tickets, so I don’t think they’ll go as quickly as Springfest.”

Armato said 5,000 tickets will be offered to students for $20 each, and 500 to parents and alumni for $40 each.

Peisner said Tuesday that purchasers would be able to choose either floor, lower level or balcony seating, on a first-come-first-serve basis. On Wednesday night, however, purchasers who got through found themselves without a choice as to where to sit. Peisner said he was not aware of the change, but suspected the site’s server problems or that some sections having already sold out.

“We’re getting very large projection screens, so there’s not going to be a bad seat in the house,” he said.

Jennifer Hardy, vice president for financial affairs for the Student Government Association and chair of the Budget Review Committee (BRC), said the BRC is allocating $197,285 for the show, about 80 percent of the total cost.

Armato said that because of how much the BRC was contributing, they got to decide on ticket pricing and restrictions on how many tickets a single student can buy. Funds will go toward production fees the actual performance.

Armato said the BRC had originally wanted to restrict sales to one ticket per student, but then decided to go with each Northeastern ID to buy a ticket plus one.

Many students expressed concern about the higher-than-usual ticket prices, but were still willing to shell out the extra cash

“I’m disappointed that it’s so expensive, but I’ll get over it,” said Jessica O’Neill, a sophomore English major.