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Where to Watch Broadway From Your Couch (and Which Shows Are Still Running)

Here is the thing nobody at a Broadway box office will tell you: a good chunk of what happens on a New York stage eventually ends up on a screen you already pay for. Not the movie version with a Hollywood cast and a soundstage. The actual production, filmed in the actual theater, with the actual cast that won the Tony. These are called proshots, and if you live somewhere that is not Manhattan,…

The Broadway Lotteries You Enter Once a Week, Not Every Day

Most Broadway lottery advice assumes a daily rhythm: enter in the morning, find out in the afternoon, repeat tomorrow. That is how most of the board works, and it is why people burn out on it after two weeks. But a handful of shows do not run that way at all. They draw once a week, or once a month, and the entry windows are long enough that you can set them and forget them. These are the…

Free Broadway Tickets for NYC High Schoolers: The Lottery Closes Monday

If you have a kid in a New York City high school, stop what you’re doing and read this one before Monday morning. The city and TDF just opened a lottery for 2,100 free Broadway tickets for students in grades 9 through 12, and the sign-up window is short — it opened Thursday morning and slams shut Monday, August 17 at 10 a.m. I’ve been writing about Broadway lotteries on this site for a while now,…

Where to Eat Before a Broadway Show With Kids

Taking kids to a Broadway show is a logistics problem wearing a fun hat. The show is the easy part. The hard part is the two hours before it, when everyone is hungry, nobody agrees, and you have a hard deadline you cannot move. I have done this run more times than I can count with my own two. Here is what actually works in the Theater District when you have kids with you, with real addresses,…

Paranormal Activity Starts Previews Friday: What to Know, and the Cheap Way In

Broadway is about to try something it has not really tried before: a horror show that wants to actually scare a paying audience of 1,200 people in a Midtown house on West 52nd Street. Paranormal Activity begins previews this Friday, August 14, at the August Wilson Theatre, and opens officially on Tuesday, August 25. It is a strictly limited 20-week engagement, which means it is gone in early…

The Fine Print on Every Broadway Lottery (and the Rules That Get Winners Turned Away)

Every Broadway lottery is free and takes about eleven seconds to enter. That part is true. What nobody mentions is that each one carries a short list of conditions attached to it, and those conditions are where people actually lose — not at the draw, at the window. I pulled the posted rules on every lottery running right now, Broadway and Off-Broadway. Here is what is buried in them, and which…

Broadway's New Season Starts Now: Every Fall First Preview

The Broadway calendar has a rhythm that nobody explains to you. Summer empties out — five shows close this month alone — and then, starting mid-August, the new season quietly begins loading in. First previews stack up through the fall like planes on a runway. This matters for exactly one practical reason: lotteries launch at first preview. Not at opening night, not when the reviews land. The day…

Pizza Before a Broadway Show: The Slice and Sit-Down List

There is a specific kind of Broadway evening where you have forty-five minutes, no reservation, and a person with you who is going to get cranky if they don’t eat. Pizza was invented for this exact scenario. Possibly not literally, but functionally, yes. I’ve done the sit-down Restaurant Row thing. I’ve done the Koreatown walk. I’ve done the pre-matinee brunch. But the meal I actually eat most…

The Cheapest Broadway Lotteries Right Now, Ranked by Price

Everybody talks about Broadway lottery odds. Almost nobody talks about the actual number you pay when you win, which is strange, because the whole point is that it’s cheap. The spread is bigger than people think. The cheapest lottery ticket in New York right now is ten dollars. The most expensive one is sixty. That’s a six-to-one range on the same city block, and the price has almost nothing to…

Kids' Night on Broadway 2026: All 22 Shows, and Which Ones Your Kid Can Actually Sit Through

Kids’ Night on Broadway is back on Tuesday, August 25, 2026, twenty-two shows are participating, and tickets are not on sale yet. That last part is the good news. You have three weeks to figure out which show your kid can actually sit through, which is more planning time than most families get for anything. Here’s the honest version of how this works, including the part the marketing copy…

The Broadway Lottery Board After the August Closings

Five shows are about to walk off the board, and if you only ever enter the lotteries you already have bookmarked, your next two weeks are going to feel weirdly quiet. I’ve been entering these things every morning for years, and the pattern is always the same. A cluster of shows closes, a chunk of the lottery board disappears with them, and everybody who was entering those shows every day quietly…

Ten New York Things the Guidebooks Miss (Almost All of Them Free)

People ask me what I do when I’m not writing about lotteries and rush tickets. Mostly I walk around. I’ve been doing that here since I was a kid, in a building in Midtown where my mother and grandmother also grew up, and the list below is what’s survived thirty-odd years of it. None of these are secrets exactly. Several have Wikipedia pages. But none of them turn up on the standard…

Who's Actually on a Broadway Stage Right Now (and the Cheap Way In)

Broadway’s late-summer 2026 casting sheet reads like someone shook a television until famous people fell out. Jim Parsons is camping through a Céline Dion songbook. Meg Stalter is playing Mary Todd Lincoln. Jonathan Groff is finishing his Bobby Darin run. Draco Malfoy is still in the building. And the full-price tickets for all of this run somewhere between “ouch” and “does the mortgage really…

Brunch Before a Broadway Matinee: A Local's Sit-Down List

The matinee is the thinking New Yorker’s Broadway slot. You’re out of the theater by 4:30 or 5 with the whole evening still ahead of you, the trains aren’t a crush yet, and — this is the part people miss — matinee day comes with a built-in excuse for a long, unhurried brunch. Dinner before a show is a race. Brunch before a matinee is a lifestyle. I’ve been eating my way down Ninth Avenue before…

TKTS vs. the Broadway Lottery: When the Red Steps Beat Your Phone

There are two religions of cheap Broadway in this town. One congregation stands under the glowing red steps in Duffy Square, squinting at a digital board. The other one refreshes a phone at 10:58 AM waiting for a lottery draw. I belong to both churches, and I’m here to tell you when each one actually pays out. What TKTS actually is The TKTS booth is run by TDF, a nonprofit that’s been doing this…

Luggage Storage Near Broadway: Where to Stash Your Bags Before Curtain

Last month I watched a family of four get stopped at the door of the Richard Rodgers with three roller bags and a look of total disbelief. They’d flown in that morning, checked out of a hotel at eleven, and figured the theater would hold their stuff the way a restaurant holds a coat. It won’t. Nobody on Broadway will. And the twenty minutes they spent arguing about it in the lobby is twenty…

Last Call: Five Broadway Shows Closing in August (and How to Get In Cheap)

Broadway does this every August. Half the marquees change at once, the tourist crowds hit their peak, and five shows start playing beat-the-clock with their final performances. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone already slipped out the side door on July 26. Five more follow before Labor Day weekend. Here’s the thing about a closing notice, though: it’s the best cheap-seat signal on Broadway. Full-price…

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