Broadway Week: which of the 25 is it for

A two-for-one is not a discount on a show. It is a discount on a seat, and the two are only the same thing when the seat was going to be expensive anyway. That is the whole trick to reading a Broadway Week list, and it is why ranking these 25 productions by how good they are answers the wrong question.

The fall edition runs 8 to 20 September 2026, tickets have been on sale since 18 August, and the participating shows are & Juliet, Aladdin, The Book of Mormon, Buena Vista Social Club, Chicago, The Great Gatsby, Hadestown, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Just in Time, The Lion King, The Lost Boys, Maybe Happy Ending, MJ, Oh Mary!, Operation Mincemeat, The Outsiders, Paranormal Activity, The Rocky Horror Show, Schmigadoon!, School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play, Six, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, Titaníque, Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) and Wicked.

Here is how we would spend it, with the reasoning stated so you can disagree with it on purpose.

1. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

The largest saving on the list, for a structural reason rather than a critical one: it is the longest and most technically elaborate thing on Broadway, it plays a big house, and it is not a show that turns up in the cheap-ticket channels week after week. Two-for-one on a rarely discounted ticket is worth more than two-for-one on a ticket that is discounted anyway, and this is the clearest case of that on the list.

2. Hadestown

Anaïs Mitchell’s Orpheus and Eurydice, staged as a smoky, jazz-inflected underworld. Second rather than first only because it is easier to reach cheaply by other means — but it is the one here most likely to be the best evening rather than the best deal, and Broadway Week is the excuse to stop putting it off.

3. Stranger Things: The First Shadow

Recent, effects-heavy, large house: the same logic as the Potter play. The difference between a good seat and a bad one is unusually wide in a show built on stagecraft, and the allocation, not you, decides which one you get. If what comes back is the back of the balcony, this is the one show on the list where the saving can cost you the point.

4. Six

Eighty minutes, no interval, Tudor England staged as a pop concert. It is the shortest thing on the list, which makes it the easiest to pair with something else in one day and the easiest to take a teenager to. On a two-for-one it is the cheapest way this fortnight to put two people inside a Broadway theatre at all.

5. Oh Mary!

The comedy, and the one whose price has least to do with spectacle. It plays a smaller house, so the offer buys proximity rather than merely a seat — and in a small house proximity is most of what you were paying for.

What we would not spend it on, and why that is not an insult

The Lion King, Wicked and Chicago are three of the longest-running things on this list and three of the safest evenings in New York. They are also the three most reliably available at some reduced price in any given month. Using a Broadway Week ticket on them is not a mistake — it is simply the purchase where the offer is doing the least work.

The same holds at the other end for the newest and smallest productions, for the opposite reason. A show still looking for its audience discounts itself. Broadway Week does not have to.

The catch nobody puts in the headline

The offer exists for the fortnight. It does not exist for every performance of every show in the fortnight. Each production sets its own blackout dates and releases its own allocation, so “is the offer on” and “is the offer on for the show I want, on the night I can go” are two different questions, and only the second one matters.

Check the individual listing before committing to an evening, and before booking anything around it. The most common way this goes wrong is not missing a show — it is a dinner reservation made for a night the show had blacked out.