by Chris Peterson
Last week, New York City announced something I’d love to see a lot more of: giving young people tickets to Broadway and into the theatres.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and TDF announced a program offering more than 2,000 free tickets to New York City high school students. Students could enter a lottery for up to two tickets to productions including Buena Vista Social Club, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, The Lost Boys, The Great Gatsby, Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play and In the Heights at New York City Center.
The lottery opened on August 13 and closed on Monday morning, August 17, so unfortunately, that portion of the program had a pretty short window.
Here are the details. Every NYC student in grades 9 through 12 who registered is eligible for a free two-month TDF membership. That membership provides access to discounted Broadway, Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway tickets, generally in the $20 to $40 range, along with free or discounted admission to a number of other cultural institutions. I joined this years ago, and it was certainly worth it at the time.
Students can still claim the membership through September 13. And yes, there is obviously a political component to all of this.
The Mamdani administration is presenting the program as part of its larger affordability and arts-access agenda. In announcing it, city officials specifically argued that culture should be viewed as a public good rather than a luxury and pointed to the administration’s record $323 million investment in the Department of Cultural Affairs.
Politically, that’s a pretty good photo opportunity for a mayor.
It’s also worth clarifying what this program actually is. This isn’t New York City promising every teenager a free Broadway ticket. It’s a lottery for a little more than 2,000 tickets, and there doesn’t appear to be an income requirement. Any NYC student in grades 9 through 12 can participate, including students attending nonpublic schools.
The announcement also doesn’t say that City Hall went out and purchased 2,000 full-price Broadway tickets. It describes a partnership between the city, TDF and TDF’s industry partners.
So, while this is certainly being used to promote the administration’s cultural agenda, I wouldn’t characterize it as the city simply handing taxpayer money to Broadway producers.
With that out of the way, I think the basic idea is terrific.
We spend a lot of time on social media talking about cultivating the next generation of audiences. Well, this is how you actually do it.
You get them in the building.
For a high school student who has never seen a Broadway show, the difference between a $150 ticket and a free ticket isn’t really a discount. It may be the difference between attending and not attending at all.
And once they’ve had that experience, maybe they come back. That’s how audiences are built.
I also like that the program extends beyond Broadway. The TDF membership can provide free or discounted access to organizations, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Museum, New York City Ballet, The Public Theater, and many others.
My biggest criticism is that I wish there were more tickets and a longer lottery window. Giving away more than 2,000 tickets is terrific, but this is still a relatively small program, and students only had a few days to enter.
So hopefully this isn’t a one-time summer promotion.
Make it bigger. Do it every year. Get more Broadway productions involved. Work directly with schools. And most importantly, give students an affordable path back once that first free ticket gets them through the door.
Mayor Mamdani will absolutely get some political mileage out of this. That’s part of being mayor.
But if the political win also means thousands of teenagers get introduced to Broadway and potentially develop a lifelong relationship with theatre, I’m all for it.
