The Best Ways To Get The Best Cheap Broadway Tickets

Unsplash/Cris Tagupa

During your next trip to New York City (or your next staycation weekend if you live in the Big Apple), the show must go on and you must be in the audience. If you’re looking for a way to get cheap Broadway tickets, don’t despair. Popular shows like “Hamilton,” “Wicked” and “Dear Evan Hanson” are a hot ticket, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get a seat in the house of the famous musicals.

Tickets to Broadway shows can run anywhere from $40 to $500+, but you can find great options for discount tickets hitting around the $50 price range with these five sources.

Online Lotteries

Technology has opened a world of cheap Broadway tickets to theater fans. Instead of saving up for months for one ticket, you can enter an online lottery and play the odds over a couple of months.

The most famous of these lotteries is the “Hamilton” one, also called Ham4Ham. The cute name comes from the fact that the winner of this lottery has to pay only $10 for a ticket. Or rather, the winner coughs up a $10 bill — the one with Alexander Hamilton’s picture on it — and gets a front row seat to one of the best musicals ever.

Many of the lotteries are around $30 per ticket, such as “The Book of Mormon,” “Aladdin,” and “Frozen.”

Rush

If you want to take your chances at an in-person ticket grab, try rushing tickets. It’s a longstanding theater tradition, involving standing in line at the box office before it even opens for the day in hopes of snagging some of the precious leftover tickets that haven’t been sold for that day’s performances. Rush tickets are sold at a pretty crazy discount and have some awesome seats available. Sometimes you can get a $30 front row ticket, but other times, you’ll end up in the nosebleeds. It all depends on your luck and how many other theater nerds also want to queue up outside the box office that day.

Unsplash/Nik Shuliahin

Broadway Roulette

Another digital option is the Broadway Roulette app. You’ll pay between $40 and $50 for tickets, but you play a game of roulette to decide which show you’ll ultimately see. You can choose six shows you don’t want to see in the current Broadway season’s lineup, but then the people at Broadway Roulette will select a show for you based on what they have available otherwise.

You can book up to three months in advance and ticket prices are locked in at $40 to $50.

TKTS Booth

When you see a giant line around the big amphitheater-style seating area in Times Square, you’ll know you’ve reached the TKTS booth. You can see which shows are being sold at a discount on a big board posted in the square (Broadway and off-Broadway shows are sold at a 25 to 50 percent discount). But beware, the line is long and good seats for the big name shows aren’t often plentiful here.

In case you don’t want to be in line in Times Square forever, there are three booth locations. You can also find TKTS at Lincoln Center and the South Street Seaport.

Today Tix

For those who have a little more budget for Broadway, we’d recommend Today Tix. You can browse through numerous theater options on this app or on the website, but offerings are both more plentiful and more expensive than rushing or lotteries. But you’ll have a better chance of seeing the exact show you want to see in the exact seat you want to see it.

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