Previews for Here There Are Blueberries begin today at the Ethel Barrymore, and the production turned up with the cheapest ticket on Broadway already on sale. Not a lottery. Not a rush. Five thousand five hundred seats at $10, for students, sold at a physical box office window on West 47th Street.
Ten dollars is the floor of this entire business. I pulled our whole board this morning and there are exactly three doors on Broadway priced at $10 — and each one asks you for something completely different.
The three $10 doors, and what each one wants from you
1. Hamilton's Ham4Ham lottery wants luck. Hamilton has been running a $10 digital draw at the Richard Rodgers for years, and it is still the most entered lottery in the city. You put your name in, you wait, and on a Thursday afternoon you almost certainly lose. The price is real. The seat is a coin flip you do not control.
2. Hiptix High wants you to be fourteen. Roundabout sells $10 tickets to anyone aged 14 to 18 under its Hiptix High tier, which right now covers The Rocky Horror Show at Studio 54. Guaranteed price, guaranteed seat, no draw — but there is a five-year window on your own birth certificate and that is the whole eligibility test.
3. Blueberries wants a student ID and a subway ride. No age band. No draw. No app. You walk to 243 West 47th Street with a valid student ID and you buy a $10 ticket for a performance later in the run.
Three identical prices, three completely different asks. The third one is new, and it is the only one of the three that nobody can lose.
What the Blueberries ticket actually is
The production put 5,500 tickets at $10 on sale on October 19, and both the trade press and the production's own announcement say the same three things about them: they are sold only at the Barrymore box office, you need a valid student ID, and they are first-come, first-served for performances later in the run. The wider schools initiative aims at 7,500 students in total.
One detail I will not pretend is settled: BroadwayWorld's write-up says two tickets per student, and Playbill's does not state a limit at all. Ask at the window, and do not plan a group of four around an assumption.
Speaking of groups — the production asks parties of ten or more students to go through a reservation form rather than queue, and says requests are reviewed first-come, first-served while the subsidised allocation lasts. If you teach, that is your move, not the window.
There is a second, separate programme that is not for sale to anybody: more than 2,000 New York City public school students and educators will see the show free at two special matinees through the Department of Education's theatre programme. That is not a cheap ticket, it is a donated one, and it does not come out of the 5,500.
The part that will trip people up: there is no app
Every other cheap seat on Broadway now lives on a phone. Telecharge, Broadway Direct, Lucky Seat, TodayTix — you enter from your desk, you get an email, you tap. We have written about all of them in the platform guide, and the mechanics are always the same shape: a screen, a window of minutes, a card on file.
This is a counter. A person. A cash register on a side street between Broadway and Eighth. Which has three consequences worth knowing before you go:
- You cannot do it from work. The Barrymore box office keeps box office hours, not internet hours. If your plan involves a lunch break, that is the plan.
- You are buying ahead, not gambling same-day. This is the opposite of a rush. You are picking a performance weeks out at a fixed price, which is the single most useful thing about it — you can actually make a plan with another human being.
- It runs out. A lottery regenerates every day forever. An allocation of 5,500 is a pile that only gets smaller, and this is a ten-week engagement with holidays in the middle of it.
That last point is the one I would act on. Five thousand five hundred sounds enormous until you divide it. Ten weeks at eight performances is roughly eighty shows. If they sold perfectly evenly — and nothing in this town sells evenly — that is about seventy seats a performance. They will not go evenly. They will go at the front.
If you are not a student, this building currently has nothing
I want to be straight about this, because a headline with a $10 in it reads like a deal for everybody. Our catalogue shows no lottery and no general rush posted for this production at all — not on Telecharge, not through the house, not on TodayTix. For a non-student the two prices in the building are $10-that-is-not-for-you and full freight.
That is not unusual for a limited straight play with a ten-week clock. It is also not permanent. Shubert houses are already wired to Telecharge's lottery plumbing, so when one of these plays decides it wants a cheap door, it can switch one on in a day — 860 did exactly that at the Imperial. We re-pull every production's pages daily, and if a lottery appears here you will see it on the show page before you see it anywhere else.
In the meantime, the honest non-student answers are the ones that always work: the booths, an in-person rush somewhere else on the block, or an age programme if you qualify for one. Our student ticket guide covers the four pathways that are not this.
The ten-week thing, said plainly
Opening night is November 9 and the run is booked through January 10, 2027. A limited engagement of a Pulitzer finalist with Kathleen Chalfant, Montego Glover, Conrad Ricamora and Brandon Flynn in it does not loosen as it goes. It tightens, and then there is no show. Moisés Kaufman directs his own Tectonic Theater Project production, co-created with Amanda Gronich, which came to Broadway by way of La Jolla.
What I would actually do
If you are a student: go to the window this week rather than in December, buy for a performance you can genuinely attend, and bring the ID — not a photo of the ID. If you are a teacher with ten kids: use the form, today.
If you are neither, enter something else. Much Ado put a $49 lottery and 2,500 student tickets at $25 on the board nine days ago at the Winter Garden, and that lottery is open to everybody. Then come back here in a few weeks, because this is the kind of production that quietly adds a rush once the reviews are in.
Two other things this week while you are planning: where a table for six actually gets seated before curtain, and nine holiday shows that are not A Christmas Carol.
