A dozen shows will be opening on Broadway over the next six weeks, ending the 2018-2019 season. Two-thirds of them have already announced their policies for official discounted tickets — rush, lottery and the like
Announced today for example: Tomorrow, its first Broadway preview, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! will launch a $40 digital lottery.
(They usually make the announcement right before the first preview, probably in hopes of increasing the publicity for the show)
Below, listed alphabetically, are other shows opening by April 25th that have already announced their discount policies, which can include in-person lottery, digital lottery, general rush (meaning showing up when the box office opens on the day of the performance.) There are also student rush (showing up when the box office opens and being a student), and standing room. Each show has its own pricing, and its own rules, but generally they limit your purchase to two tickets, and most times (except for digital lotteries) you can pay either with cash or a credit card.
Ain’t Too Proud Digital Lottery $42, Student Rush $29
All My Sons
General Rush: $47, (rear mezzanine). Student Rush: half price. Mobile Lottery $35 via Today TIx. $10 First Previews (ACCESS10 promo code) rear mezzanine
Beetlejuice: General Rush: $43
Burn This. Mobile Lottery: $39 via Today Tix
Hadestown, $42 lottery. General rush: $42.50; standing room: $39
Hillary and Clinton: General Rush $40
Ink.Mobile Rush $30. via Today Tix
King Lear General Rush $40
Tootsie Digital lottery: $42. General Rush: $42
What The Constitution Means to Me: General Rush $42
There are always the half-price TDF TKTS booths, where the discounts aren’t as steep, but you’re more assured of getting them.
For details on the shows, check out my 2018-2019 Broadway Season Guide
Week in New York Theater Reviews
“I’m not obsessed with sex; I just can’t stop thinking about it,” says Phoebe Waller-Bridge in “Fleabag” — both the “Fleabag” that’s a funny and sad BBC TV series, currently available on Amazon Prime…and her funny and sad solo show, which she’s currently performing live on stage at Soho Playhouse….I was struck by how the characters and stories in the play of “Fleabag,” told in an hour-long monologue by a performer sitting on a chair on the stage, were mostly the exact same characters and stories that were made into scenes in the six episodes of the TV show’s first season….There is much more about Hillary, the guinea pig, in the stage play than on the TV series. I guess it’s easier to talk about a guinea pig than have one perform on screen.
Actually, We’re F**ked
Playwright Matt Williams, who is credited with creating, producing and/or writing such once-popular TV series as Home Improvement, The Cosby Show, and Roseanne, tells us in the program that the idea for this play, currently running at the Cherry Lane, began when he overheard his grown children and their friends at a dinner party having a wide-ranging conversation. They talked about the urgent issues facing the world, which segued into the prospect of having children, and an argument about how their hypothetical children should be raised, which climaxed with a debate about whether it’s even ethical to bring a child into such a world. And that’s how the play begins, more or less, with two couples in their early 30s at a dinner party having a conversation mostly about the various issues involved in raising a child.
But the playwright doesn’t explain in the program why he came up with such an adolescent title, nor why he swerves into an implausible, twisty plot that resembles a comedy in its complications but is only intermittently funny.
By the end of “Holy Day,” two hours without intermission or let-up of gothic horror set in 19th century Australia, the audience has sat through a missing child, an abduction, both homosexual and heterosexual rape, disfigurement, a suicide, vitriolic bigotry, and a massacre — and also a question: Why would a young, downtown theater company put on this relentlessly gruesome play, which was written in 2001 by Australian playwright Andrew Bovell?…Yet, I can’t remember the last time I saw such a hateful play given such an impressive production. The eight-member cast is intense and committed, Marisa Kaugar’s set design is simple but effective; Caroline Eng’s sound design adds tension and suspense.
Near the end of “The Mother,” her son strangles the title character to death. But not really. The mother (Isabelle Huppert) is imagining it, or dreaming it. There is a change of lighting, her husband (Chris Noth) is standing over her hospital bed, and the mother, no longer dead, says: “What’s going on?”
What indeed? “The Mother,” which is on stage at the Atlantic Theater through April 13, is about a middle-aged woman who has become unmoored after her children have grown up and left home – especially her son Nicolas (Justice Smith.) The woman has only brief moments of fitful clarity. The same could be said of the play…What engages us in “The Mother” is the thrill of seeing a starry cast.
Week in New York Theater News
Hugh Jackman is to star in the fourth Broadway production of The Music Man
“In The Green,” a new musical by (and starring) Grace McLean, tells the story of Hildegard von Bingen, a medieval writer, healer, composer, and eventually saint, who grew up locked in a cell with her mentor, Jutta. (Grace will play Jutta) Lincoln Center Theater’s June 8 – Aug 4
The new project by Anna Deavere Smith has been delayed. Instead, New York Theater Workshop is offering Chisa Hutchinson’s Proof of Love, at Minetta_Lane, starring Suzzanne Douglas as Constance, forced to face uncomfortable truths after a tragic accident. Opens May 14
Anna D. Shapiro will direct The Devil Wears Prada
Jeremy Jordan will join Waitress, portraying love hunk Dr. Pomatter opposite Soshana Bean as Jenna, April 8 – May 12.
FREE Concert by Patti LaBelle will kick off BRIC arts 41st season and BRIC celebrates Brooklyn festival at the Prospect Park Bandshell June 4th.
The Paper Mill Playhouse will present the world-premiere musical “Unmasked: The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber January 30-March 1, 2020. It’ll combine biography w/ greatest hits w/ “new material and rediscovered gems.”
“safeword,” a new play by S. Asher Gelman that explores ”power dynamics through BDSM and food,”
is scheduled to run at The American Theatre of Actors 314 W. 54th Street
from April 11 to July 7th. (BDSM, for the uninitiated, stands for Bondage, Dominance, Sadism, and Masochism). Gelman’s first play, “Afterglow,” zbout a married gay couple who invite a third man into their relationship, was supposed to have a two-month run, but lasted more than a year.
Harper Lee was blunt in her disgust with her hometown for exploiting her and her book To Kill A Mockingbird.
