Two things happened on Broadway in the last four days, and one of them is much bigger than it sounds.
Moulin Rouge! The Musical played its final performance Sunday, August 30, after six years at the Hirschfeld. And on August 27, Six — the show that opened the night Broadway shut down in 2020, closed before it could take a bow, and came back to run five years anyway — set a closing date of January 3, 2027.
That is 2,178 performances at the Lena Horne. It is also, for anybody keeping a cheap-seats list, the beginning of a countdown on one of the friendliest boards in the district.
Six is closing, and it has three doors until it does
Four months is a long runway, which is exactly why this is worth writing down now instead of in December. The last six weeks of any Broadway run are when the lottery odds fall off a cliff — everyone who has been meaning to go finally goes.
Right now Six still carries all three of its routes:
- $45 Broadway Direct lottery, and its entry window closes later in the evening than almost anything else on that platform. If you have ever missed a Broadway Direct cutoff, this is the show that forgives you.
- $35 student rush at the Lena Horne box office with a valid student ID, from mid-morning most days and midday Sunday. Limit two, and the production releases a minimum of six per performance.
- $49 standing room, sold only when the house is already sold out.
Enter now. Enter in October. The $45 seat you can get in September is the $200 seat you cannot get in December.
Moulin Rouge is gone, and so is its $49 lottery
The Lucky Seat draw that put people into the Hirschfeld for $49 ended with the run. This is the part of a closing that nobody announces: a lottery is not a program, it is an attachment to a production. When the show goes, the door goes with it, and the entry page just quietly stops accepting you.
If Moulin Rouge was your standing Lucky Seat entry, the same platform still runs draws for The Book of Mormon ($49, all-in), Hadestown ($49), Titanique ($49) and Paranormal Activity ($40, also all-in). Same account, same rhythm, four shows instead of one.
Watch the Lucky Seat timing, because it is the trap on that platform: weekday entries close at 9:30 in the morning the day before, and weekend and Monday performances all close at 9:30 the Friday before. Miss Friday and you have missed three performances, not one.
September’s actual closing board
Three more runs end this month, and one of them takes three separate cheap-seat doors with it.
- Are You Now or Have You Ever Been — September 11, at New York City Center. No lottery, no rush; the way in is MTC35, Manhattan Theatre Club’s $35 rate for anyone 35 and under. Free to join, and your guest can be any age.
- Titanique — September 20, at the St. James. Three doors right up to the end: a $49 Lucky Seat lottery, a $49 TodayTix rush from the morning of each performance, and $45 in person at the box office. Two people in one rush line can buy four seats together, which no lottery on Broadway lets you do.
- The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee — October 11, at New World Stages. Just outside the month, but its cast turns over inside it: Alex Newell and Laura Marano give their final performances September 6, and from September 7 Ali Stroker takes over as Rona Lisa Peretti with Olympic gold medalist Laurie Hernandez joining as Logainne. The $39 Telecharge lottery and $49 Telecharge rush both continue.
One departure that is not a closing: Ivy leaves Chicago after September 6, wrapping her Broadway debut as Roxie Hart before taking the same role to Seoul in December. Chicago itself is not going anywhere, and it still runs $49 rush and $39 standing room.
What starts
School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play begins previews at the Samuel J. Friedman on September 8, with Lucia Aremu, Denée Benton and Patina Miller. The Friedman is a Manhattan Theatre Club house, which means MTC35 applies — the same $35 under-35 rate that is currently the only cheap door to Are You Now. There is no lottery or rush in the catalog for it yet, and I would treat any prediction of one as a read rather than an announcement. Programs get confirmed around first preview, not before.
Gazillion Bubble Show deserves a correction, because several roundups still have it wrong. It was set to end a nineteen-year New World Stages run on September 7. It extended to January 18, 2027, which carries it through the holidays and past its twentieth anniversary in New York. It is not closing next week.
The short version
Six has a date. Titanique has three weeks. Moulin Rouge is already a memory and its lottery went with it. And the fall openings have not switched their discount programs on yet, so the next three weeks are a window where the board is unusually stable and unusually generous.
The live board is on the lottery hub, and if you want the whole current picture in one sitting, every Broadway show running right now has a cheap way in — all twenty-five of them, sorted by how many doors each one gives you.
