In our experience, there are two kinds of New Yorkers: the Broadway diehards—who always seem to have tickets to the hot show du jour before it’s on anyone else’s radar—and the rest of us, whose theatergoing is generally relegated to entertaining out-of-town guests once or twice a year or halfheartedly entering the Hamilton lottery when we remember to.
If you fall into the latter camp (like, ahem, yours truly), it’s probably not so much from lack of interest as it is from feeling overwhelmed by options (Mean Girls or Waitress?) and not wanting to spend a fortune. So when we heard about Broadway Roulette, it sounded like a tailor-made remedy for our decision paralysis.
Here’s how it works: Pick a date up to three months in advance, pay just $49 or $59 and find out what you’re seeing the day of the show. And since we know you’re wondering, every current show on Broadway is on the table—yes, that includes Hamilton.
Co-founder Elizabeth Durand Streisand came up with the idea when she realized that despite being surrounded by some of the world’s best theater, she was spending her free time watching Netflix. (Uh, same.) “People are too tired to weed through lists and reviews to figure out what to see,” she says. “And the longer you spend researching, the more pressure there is if you don’t love it.”