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    Broadway Tickets: Where to Get Affordable and Last-Minute Tickets

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    Box-office sales, discount booths, same-day rush: Here’s everything you need to know about nabbing seats to plays and musicals in Manhattan.People always want to know the secret to buying Broadway tickets — whether there’s some better way than the box office, or a magic trick for snagging seats to an ultrahot show (preferably, without having to pay full price).If you’re looking for a deal on a huge hit, you will search in vain. But lots of other shows offer discounts. Some may be in previews (which means critics haven’t yet weighed in) or, having been around a while, are running low on fuel. Excellent productions might be in the mix.As long as you’re willing to be flexible, and put in a little work, it’s easy enough to assemble the kind of theatergoing experience you’ll enjoy. Here’s how to navigate it all.Where do I begin?Your safest bet to guard against the heartbreak of counterfeit tickets is to buy them through the show’s website, which usually redirects you to sites like Telecharge or Ticketmaster to complete the purchase. As you scope out a show online, that should be your starting place.Is it worth going to the theater’s box office?Yes, if you have the time. Not only can you ask the ticket seller’s advice on the best seats for your price point, you can also avoid the hefty online service fees. If you have a discount code, like the ones sometimes offered on theatermania.com or broadwaybox.com, it should work in person, too. But do check on the box office hours before heading out.Is there an app I can use?The TodayTix app is a trustworthy source for often-discounted Broadway tickets, which users buy online. For some shows, you can choose your exact seats; for others, you pick the general section where you want to sit, and TodayTix assigns your seats. Whether you get bar-coded electronic tickets delivered to your device or physical tickets that you pick up at the theater box office depends on the show.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Swept Away’ Review: Lost at Sea, How Far Would You Sink?

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      If you know the tale of the yacht Mignonette, or the Avett Brothers album of the same name, you’ll guess from the first moments of “Swept Away,” a Broadway musical based on both, where the horrific story is headed. But you may not guess how spectacularly it gets there.The Mignonette was wrecked at sea on July 5, 1884, en route to Sydney from Southampton, England. Its captain, two crewmen and cabin boy survived on a lifeboat for about 20 days until, facing death from starvation, some of them made one of them their unfortunate salvation.Though drawing most of its songs and themes from that 2004 album, the musical, which opened Tuesday at the Longacre Theater, leaves the specifics of the Mignonette behind. Instead of a small pleasure boat, its vessel is a 300-ton triple-masted whaler. It is American, not English, sailing from New Bedford, Mass. Its captain commands a much larger crew: in Michael Mayer’s literally overwhelming production, 15 Broadway-hardy men.Among them, the Mate (John Gallagher Jr.) has the most experience of filthy life below decks and depravity on solid ground. At the opposite end of the scale of innocence, a teenager called Little Brother (Adrian Blake Enscoe) has run away from his family’s farm for excitement and adventure. Hot on his tail, Big Brother (Stark Sands) arrives in New Bedford to drag him home, away from impiety, but gets stuck aboard as the ship heaves off.If it were not already plain from a ghostly prologue that they are all doomed, the Captain (Wayne Duvall) sees portents almost immediately in the sea’s phosphorescence. This is, he says, his last voyage, as both he, the ship and the whaling industry are failing. You can take that theologically too: How will we face our own last voyages? That the characters are identified by titles rather than names suggests the show’s morality-tale ambitions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Tammy Faye’ Musical to Close After Failing to Find Broadway Audience

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      Well-reviewed in London but poorly received in New York, the musical with an Elton John score will end its run on Dec. 8.“Tammy Faye,” a new musical about the scandal-wracked singing televangelist, will close on Broadway after an unexpectedly short run, a major disappointment for a costly and ambitious show that picked up some good reviews in London but was poorly received in New York and failed to find an audience.The musical, which opened on Nov. 14, will close on Dec. 8, at which point it will have had 24 preview and 29 regular performances.The show was capitalized for $22 million, according to a spokesman for the production (it could have raised up to $25 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but wound up budgeted for less). The box office performance has been disastrous: last week, it was the lowest-grossing show on Broadway, and played to houses that were 37 percent empty in one of Broadway’s largest theaters.The show has an accomplished creative team. The music is by Elton John and the lyrics are by Jake Shears of the Scissor Sisters; the book is by James Graham, a well-regarded British playwright; and the director is Rupert Goold, who is the artistic director of the Almeida Theater in London. The show had an initial run at the Almeida starting in the fall of 2022.“Tammy Faye” is at the Palace Theater, which recently resumed operations after a lengthy renovation. Reviews were mostly negative; in The New York Times, the critic Elisabeth Vincentelli called it a “disjointed, strangely bland musical.”The cast is led by Katie Brayben, making her Broadway debut as the title character, Tammy Faye Bakker; she won an Olivier Award for her performance in London. She is joined by Christian Borle as the protagonist’s husband, Jim Bakker; Borle, a two-time Tony winner, was a late-in-the-game replacement for Andrew Rannells, who played the role in London and was announced for New York but left the project after failing to reach an agreement on employment terms with the producers.“Tammy Faye” is produced by Rocket Stage, which is John’s production company, along with Greene Light Stage, which is led by Sally Greene, and James L. Nederlander. Nederlander is the president and chief executive of the Nederlander Organization, which operates nine Broadway houses including the Palace. More

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      ‘Les Misérables’ Returns Home

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      The most famous French musical has never been popular in Paris. A major new production hopes to change that, reworking it for a contemporary French audience.Globally, it’s the most famous French musical. One hundred and thirty million people have seen Jean Valjean face off against Javert, in 22 languages; its downtrodden characters have taken to the barricades in London’s West End nearly continuously since 1985.Everyone knows “Les Misérables.” Everyone — except the French.In a strange twist of fate, “Les Miz,” an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s sweeping novel about justice, poverty and the social reality of 19th-century France, has never been popular in the country of its birth. Despite being created by two Frenchmen, the composer Claude-Michel Schönberg and the lyricist Alain Boublil, it has only been performed in Paris twice since the 1980s. The 2012 film adaptation, starring Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway, also performed poorly at the French box office.Now a major new stage production, set to open at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on Wednesday, aims to make “Les Misérables” a star at home, too — with the enthusiastic assent of its creators.During a recent rehearsal, in an impersonal industrial space in Romainville, a Paris suburb, Schönberg, 80, held his fist in the air as the nearly 40-strong cast belted out an impassioned French-language version of the finale, “Do You Hear the People Sing?”Claude-Michel Schönberg, left, and Alain Boublil, right, wrote the music and lyrics for the original French musical, which premiered in 1980. For this year’s revival, Schönberg updated the lyrics based on “the corrections that had been made over time internationally,” he said.Violette Franchi for The New York Times“Returning to France is important to us, because it’s our culture, our way of thinking,” Boublil, 83, said in an interview between rehearsals. “Even though we’ve both lived abroad for a long time, that hasn’t changed.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Shit. Meet. Fan.’ Review: Packed with Stars and Vulgarity

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      Neil Patrick Harris, Jane Krakowski, Debra Messing and Constance Wu star in the vulgar and entertaining new work from Robert O’Hara.The script to Robert O’Hara’s new play is prefaced with a trigger warning: “This play is a blistering vulgar satire on Male Toxicity and White Privilege.”Blistering? Yeah. Vulgar? Certainly. And viciously entertaining. But when it comes to the show’s loftier ambitions — the “satire” part of “blistering vulgar satire” — its execution is edgy but not necessarily sharp.“Shit. Meet. Fan.,” which opened Monday at MCC Theater and is based on the 2016 Italian film “Perfect Strangers,” opens in a chic Dumbo condo where Rodger (Neil Patrick Harris) and Eve (Jane Krakowski) live with their teenage daughter, Sam (Genevieve Hannelius). But for all the apartment’s swanky accouterments (including a home bar and spacious terrace, all courtesy of Clint Ramos’s Zillow-perfect set design), there’s no domestic bliss here, especially not between the married couple.But for tonight Rodger and Eve are the hosts of a gladiatorial fight night disguised as a party of friends who’ve come to watch an eclipse. This coterie includes Claire (Debra Messing), a heavy drinker with some mother-in-law issues, and Brett (Garret Dillahunt), her tone-deaf lawyer husband; Frank (Michael Oberholtzer), the bro-iest of the bros, and his new wife, Hannah (Constance Wu, again playing the precious outsider); and Logan (a sharp Tramell Tillman), who shows up sans his new girlfriend. The men are brothers from frat days past, which means alcohol, cocaine, bawdy tales and shared secrets, often dividing the party among gender lines.But the real trouble of the night begins when Eve suggests a game: for an hour everyone must share the texts, emails and calls they get on their phones. The reveals revolve around exes, affairs, hidden sexual preferences, plastic surgery appointments, timeshares in the Swiss Alps, even crimes. It soon becomes clear that, unsurprisingly, these friends are awful in a Whitman’s sampler assortment of ways. O’Hara, who wrote and directed the show, gleefully pokes at these characters’ insecurities, hypocrisies and resentments as a stream of Bravo TV-sized revelations steadily raises the stakes. The direction is brilliantly cued and paced, so the party’s movement (both the movement of the characters in relation to one another in the two-story space, and the flow of the dialogue in each scene) keeps the play going at a taut and lively momentum.And it helps that this is no cast of slouches. The comedic chemistry of the group is palpable, and each actor brings their own delicious affect to their role. Harris shows off his impeccable comic timing with Rodger’s sardonic quips and Krakowski fully inhabits the snide mean girl. A hilariously clowny Messing goes full “Will & Grace” with Claire’s hyperbolic drunken reactions, and Dillahunt takes hearty bites of his character’s casual bigotry.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Broadway Shows to See This Fall: ‘Our Town,’ ‘Gypsy’ and More

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      Broadway Shows to See This Fall: ‘Our Town,’ ‘Gypsy’ and MoreA guide to every show on Broadway, including new musicals, Tony winning-dramas, quirky hits and veterans like “Hamilton” and “Chicago.”Jim Parsons, at left, as the Stage Manager in “Our Town,” which runs through Jan. 19 at the Barrymore Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMusicals to Leave You HummingCabaret“Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome” — but for real this time. With a sinuous, sensuous Adam Lambert now starring as the Emcee, Rebecca Frecknall’s darkly seductive take on the Kander and Ebb classic has acquired a much more human feel. Inside Tom Scutt’s Tony-winning immersive design of the Weimar-era Kit Kat Club, the show is newly rebalanced for the better with Auliʻi Cravalho as Sally Bowles and Calvin Leon Smith as Clifford Bradshaw, while Bebe Neuwirth as Fräulein Schneider and Steven Skybell as Herr Schultz will still charm your heart, then break it. (At the August Wilson Theater.) Read the review.The Great GatsbyEva Noblezada (“Hadestown”) stars as Daisy opposite Jeremy Jordan (“Newsies”), who plays his final performance as Gatsby on Jan. 19. This musical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age novel has a book by Kait Kerrigan (“The Mad Ones”), with music by Jason Howland and lyrics by Nathan Tysen (both of “Paradise Square”). Marc Bruni (“Beautiful: The Carole King Musical”) directs. Linda Cho’s luxurious 1920s costumes won the show a Tony. (At the Broadway Theater.) Read the review.GypsyGrabbing the baton first handed off by Ethel Merman, Audra McDonald plays the formidable Momma Rose in the fifth Broadway revival of Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim’s exalted 1959 musical about a vaudeville stage mother and her daughters: June, the favorite child, and Louise, who becomes the burlesque stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Directed by George C. Wolfe, with choreography by Camille A. Brown, the cast includes Danny Burstein, Joy Woods, Jordan Tyson and Lesli Margherita. (Starts previews Nov. 21 at the Majestic Theater; opens Dec. 19.) Read more about the production.Hell’s KitchenAlicia Keys’s own coming-of-age is the inspiration for this jukebox musical stocked with her songs. With numbers including “Girl on Fire,” “Fallin’” and “Empire State of Mind,” it’s the story of a 17-year-old (Maleah Joi Moon, a newly minted Tony winner making her Broadway debut) in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, growing into an artist. Shoshana Bean (through Dec. 1) and Brandon Victor Dixon play her parents, and Kecia Lewis plays her piano teacher in a Tony-winning performance. Directed by Michael Greif, the show has a book by Kristoffer Diaz and choreography by Camille A. Brown. (At the Shubert Theater.) Read the review.Maybe Happy EndingRobot neighbors in Seoul, nearing obsolescence, tumble into odd-couple friendship in this wistfully romantic charmer of a musical comedy by Will Aronson and Hue Park, starring Darren Criss and Helen J Shen. Michael Arden (“Parade”) directs. At the Belasco Theater. Read the review.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The ‘Death Becomes Her’ Frenemies Take Their Youth Potion to Broadway

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      The campy supernatural movie comes to Broadway as a big, bawdy musical starring Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard.To be a marquee name after the ingénue years and to feel validated in a cutthroat business: For many actresses on Broadway or anywhere, those can be constant cravings. For Megan Hilty, one of the stars of the new Broadway musical “Death Becomes Her,” they’re urgent themes.“I have this number in the show that’s quite funny,” Hilty said during a recent interview. “But also it taps into something unbearably honest about the lengths to which women, mostly, can torture themselves thinking: How far am I willing to go to be what this world and industry wants and needs me to be in order to feel relevant?”But this isn’t the earnest-minded “Suffs,” not by a long shot.“Death Becomes Her” is a big, bawdy musical of to-the-rafters power ballads, va-va-voom costumes, zippy one-liners and vogueing chorus boys. It’s based on Robert Zemeckis’s supernatural horror comedy, from 1992, about two women — Madeline Ashton, a pompous actress played by Meryl Streep, and Helen Sharp, an unhinged novelist played by Goldie Hawn — who become frenemy immortals after they drink a potion that a mysterious glamourpuss named Lisle Von Rhuman (Isabella Rossellini) assures them will impart eternal youth.No spoiler alert: It does, but it’s not pretty. Rotting flesh never is.Forever young: Hilty as the pompous Madeline Ashton and Simard as the unhinged Helen Sharp, roles made famous by Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe show comes to Broadway after a Chicago run last spring that received mostly good reviews, with much of the praise saved for Hilty and her co-star, Jennifer Simard, who plays Helen to Hilty’s Madeline. As with any Broadway transfer, the show’s creative team, led by its director-choreographer Christopher Gattelli, has spent months futzing — finessing new illusions, adding a new second-act song, redesigning costumes.What hasn’t changed is that Madeline seduces and marries Helen’s husband, Ernest, played by Christopher Sieber (Bruce Willis in the film). And the show still has, as Simard put it, its “nougaty center”: A story about two women who make a ghastly but farcical Faustian bargain that’s rooted in private shame and universal heartache over youth, beauty and self-worth.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      7 Days in the Cultural Life of a Broadway Stage Manager

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      When he’s not herding performers at “Once Upon a Mattress,” Cody Renard Richard is bowling, catching up with theater friends and, to his surprise, bumping into Beyoncé.Cody Renard Richard is backstage at the Hudson Theater eight performances a week, wrangling actors and calling cues at “Once Upon a Mattress.”When he has free time, he crams in as many fashion shows, museum visits, board meetings, teaching gigs and other cultural events as possible.“My entire journey in New York is about trying new things and expanding my reach,” Richard, 36, who grew up in Waller, Texas, said in a phone conversation on a Monday, the one day of the week he isn’t working on “Mattress.”Richard has been stage managing since his teenage years, when he was a self-described “troublemaker” before his high school’s theater director, Carrie Wood, encouraged him to channel that energy into a role backstage.Richard at the Hudson Theater, the current home of “Once Upon a Mattress.” “Sometimes people wonder if it gets boring working on the same show every night, but I never do,” he said.Graham Dickie/The New York TimesHe’s now managed nearly 50 television, opera and stage productions in New York, including the MTV Video Music Awards, the Broadway productions of “Lempicka” and “Sweeney Todd,” and “Ragtime” at New York City Center earlier this month. He’s next headed to Los Angeles, where he’ll oversee a monthlong “Mattress” run.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elf on Broadway Review: Grey Henson Is on the Nice List

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      The musical, starring Grey Henson, has gotten Buddy delightfully, entirely right. But he is trapped inside a creaky adaptation.Santa Clauses are pretty interchangeable. The real Santa’s close friend Buddy the elf would disagree, but it’s true: Put on the red costume, hide behind the glossy beard, manage a few ho, ho, hos and anyone will do.Buddy, though? That’s a much tougher role to cast — and not only because Will Ferrell made him such an indelibly adorable doofus in the 2003 movie “Elf.” In “Elf the Musical,” Buddy is the one character in whom we must absolutely believe: a full-grown man in a green elf suit with curl-toed boots, naïve and wonder-struck in the big city.Get it wrong and it’s a recipe for cringe. Get it right and you’ve cracked the code of all-ages comedy, the kind that will leave children and grown-ups equally helpless with laughter.In its latest Broadway outing, starring an exuberant Grey Henson in the title role, “Elf the Musical” has gotten Buddy delightfully, entirely right. From his first spoken line — the word Santa, cried joyously with what sounds like at least five exclamation points — he is enchanting in his silliness.He cartwheels across the stage because why wouldn’t he? A trusting, uninhibited goofball, he lives in his body the way children do, nearly bursting with eagerness. But Buddy is 30; he can show you how many that is on his fingers, flashing what look like boneless jazz hands.Directed by Philip Wm. McKinley, “Elf” is loaded with playful, energetic dance numbers.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More