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 redistributes themselves across whatever’s left. Some lotteries get noticeably tougher. A few stay exactly as winnable as they were. And a handful of people never adjust at all and spend September wondering why they stopped winning.
So here’s the board as it actually stands right now, what’s leaving, and where I’d put my entries this week.
What’s gone by the end of August
Five Broadway houses go dark this month, and four of them were running a lottery right up to the end:
- CATS: The Jellicle Ball — Broadhurst Theatre, closes August 8. $49 Telecharge lottery.
- Every Brilliant Thing — Hudson Theatre, closes August 9. Lucky Seat lottery.
- Death of a Salesman — Winter Garden Theatre, closes August 9. $49 Telecharge lottery, entries open at midnight the day before and close at 3 PM.
- Ragtime — Vivian Beaumont Theater, closes August 16. Telecharge lottery, plus LincTix if you’re under 35.
- Moulin Rouge — Al Hirschfeld Theatre, closes August 30. $49 Lucky Seat lottery; weekday entries close at 9:30 AM the day before.
That’s the closing wave. Ragtime won Best Revival of a Musical at this year’s Tonys and is closing anyway, which is Broadway economics in one sentence.
September takes another bite: Just in Time (Circle in the Square) and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee both close September 6, Masquerade ends its run at 218 W 57th the same day, and Titanique — which extended out of the August list once already — finishes at the St. James on September 20.
What the closings actually do to your odds
Two things happen, and they pull in opposite directions.
First, in the final week of a run, a closing show’s lottery gets harder, not easier. Everyone who has been saying “I’ll get to it” suddenly gets to it. If you want CATS: The Jellicle Ball or Salesman, you have days, not weeks, and you’re entering against a crowd that just woke up.
Second, once those shows are gone, all that daily entry traffic has to land somewhere. It lands on the shows that stay. That’s the part people don’t plan for. Your Wicked odds in September are not your Wicked odds in July.
The move is to widen your daily list before the closings, not after. If you’re entering four shows a day right now and two of them close on August 9, you want the replacements already in your routine so you’re not starting cold against everyone else who’s starting cold.
The Broadway board that survives September
Here’s what’s still standing, roughly by price, with the platform you’ll need an account on:
- Hamilton — $10, in the Hamilton app or on the show’s site. Opens Friday morning for the following week. Cheapest ticket on Broadway and the longest odds on Broadway, both by a mile.
- Maybe Happy Ending — $20.64 via Telecharge. The oddest price on the board and, dollar for dollar, one of the best.
- The Rocky Horror Show — $30 via TodayTix.
- Harry Potter and the Cursed Child — $40 via TodayTix.
- Six, Schmigadoon!, The Lost Boys — $45 via Broadway Direct. The Great Gatsby runs its own $45 lottery.
- Oh, Mary! — $47 via Telecharge. Meg Stalter is in it through September 12.
- The Outsiders, Operation Mincemeat, Buena Vista Social Club — $49 via Telecharge. MJ — $49 via Broadway Direct, entries open 9 AM the day before and close at 3 PM. Hadestown — $49 via Lucky Seat.
- Wicked — $55, The Lion King — $60, both Broadway Direct. Long shots, but they run every single day.
- Also running lotteries without a posted price on our board: Stranger Things: The First Shadow and Aladdin (Broadway Direct), The Book of Mormon (Lucky Seat), Two Strangers (Telecharge).
The part nobody uses: Off-Broadway
Every closing wave is a good reminder that the Off-Broadway lottery board barely moves and almost nobody enters it. Katsura Sunshine’s Rakugo is $20 through Telecharge. Heathers is $38, Little Shop of Horrors is $40, and Jamie Allan’s Amaze is $49, all Telecharge. The three Theater Center shows — Perfect Crime, Singfeld!, and Friends! The Musical Parody — are $39 each through Lucky Seat. The Play That Goes Wrong runs its own $35 lottery with a cutoff of 3 PM two days out, which trips people up constantly.
I wrote a whole piece on the Off-Broadway lotteries nobody enters, and the argument hasn’t changed: same city, same evening, a fraction of the competition.
What I’d do this week
Three things, in order.
Enter the closings now, daily, until they’re gone. CATS: The Jellicle Ball, Every Brilliant Thing, and Salesman all end within a week. Ragtime has two weeks. Moulin Rouge has a month. After that they’re a memory and a T-shirt.
Add two survivors to your daily list today. Not on August 17. Today. Pick one Telecharge show and one Broadway Direct show so you’re not stuck refreshing a single platform.
Put one Off-Broadway entry in the rotation. It costs you thirty seconds and it’s the entry most likely to actually hit.
If you want the full mechanics — which platform opens when, how the claim windows work, what happens if you miss one — start with how to win every Broadway lottery and the platform guide. And the lottery hub is the live board; it updates as shows close, which is more than I can say for my own memory.
See you at the 7 PM curtain, hopefully in a seat somebody else paid retail for.
