Cheap theater: Where to enjoy affordable shows in NYC

The civic-minded Oskar Eustis is artistic director of this local institution dedicated to the work of new American playwrights but also known for its Shakespeare productions (Shakespeare in the Park). The building, an Astor Place landmark, has five stages, plays host to the annual Under the Radar festival, nurtures productions in its Lab series and is also home to the Joe’s Pub music venue.

The Delacorte Theater in Central Park is the fair-weather sister of the Public Theater. When not producing Shakespeare in the East Village, the Public offers the best of the Bard outdoors during Shakespeare in the Park (May–August). Free tickets (two per person) are distributed at both theaters at 1pm on the day of the performance. It's usually good to begin waiting around 9am, although the line can start forming as early as 6am when big-name stars are on the bill. You can also enter an online lottery for tickets.

The adventurous theatergoer’s alternative to BAM, St. Ann’s Warehouse offers an eclectic lineup of theater and music; recent shows have included high-level work by the Wooster Group and National Theatre of Scotland. In 2015 it moved to the impressive Tobacco Warehouse, built in the 1870s as an inspection center for tobacco and newly renovated for theatrical use.

Steps on Broadway offers classes in many styles with some of the finest teachers in New York.

Opened in 1924 as the 46th Street Theatre, the space was renamed in 1990 to honor the legendary composer Richard Rodgers (Oklahoma!, Carousel, The Sound of Music). This Nederlander-owned theater (1,319 seats) has hosted several beloved musicals including Anything Goes, Damn Yankees, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and Movin' Out. Extra fun for little Broadway buffs: Check out the Richard Rodgers Gallery, featuring memorabilia from the composer’s career.

After a recent refurbishment, this downtown stalwart is now one of the most comfortable experimental spaces, what with its cozy lobby café (1 Dominick) and relatively impressive multimedia capacity. The upstairs space—long, wide and low—has played host to recent smashes like Taylor Mac’s epic The Lily’s Revenge, while the downstairs 70-seat black box sees new works by everyone from Karinne Keithley to Tina Satter. HERE’s strength lies in its come-one-come-all attitude, its absurdly generous grant and commissioning programs, and a genuine warmth that is largely thanks to the venue’s doyenne and founder, Kristin Marting, and the community of artists who call HERE a second home.

The Black Nexxus complex offers acting classes as well as a performance space—the Susan Batson Studio Theater, named for the group's artistic director—for shows with African-American themes.

Located on West 45th west of Eighth Avenue, this building originally opened for business as the Martin Beck Theatre in 1924. Since 2003 it has been known as the Al Hirschfeld, after the immensely prolific and long-lived theater caricaturist. Seating capacity is 1,292 for plays and 1,282 for musicals. In recent seasons, it has hosted several major musical revivals: Guys and Dolls, The Sound of Music, Kiss Me Kate and most recently, Hair.

Imported to the U.S. from Sweden in 1876, this venue is the coziest in all of NYC. Employing handmade marionettes and beautiful sets, the resident company mounts citified versions of well-known stories.

Named after the great American thespian Edwin Booth, this venue, built in 1913, is a relatively intimate playhouse (766 seats) nestled near Shubert Alley. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Sunday in the Park with George played here in 1984, and so did Robert Morse in Tru. More recently, the Booth was home to the Pulitzer Prize–winning musical Next to Normal and the Tony-winning revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

More than 300 important contemporary plays have premiered here, among them dramas such as Driving Miss Daisy and The Heidi Chronicles and musicals such as Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins and Sunday in the Park with George. Recent seasons have included works by Craig Lucas and an acclaimed musical version of the cult film Grey Gardens.

This classic 1903 Art Nouveau house has seen many changes on the Main Stem over the last century: vaudeville, classics, the Ziegfeld Follies (for more than two decades) and the drastic decline of the theater district during the Great Depression, and again in the 1970s and ’80s. Renovated and reopened, in 1997, the New Amsterdam soon became home to the Disney smash hit The Lion King. Since 2006, Mary Poppins has been wowing children and adults there. (The Lion King moved to the Minksoff.) The theater is operated by Disney Theatrical Productions.

Formerly located in a funky Williamsburg garabge, this laboratory for rule-breaking live performance moved to the West Village in 2016 and then moved a few buildings over in 2018. The space is shared by a collective of groups including Mallory Catlett, Annie Dorsen, Jim Findlay, Findlay//Sandsmark, Daniel Fish, Immediate Medium, Aaron Landsman, Okwui Okpokwasili and Radiohole.

This chic, state-of-the-art venue, which comprises an Off Broadway space and two smaller theaters, is home to a lot of worthy programming, such as the annual Brits Off Broadway festival, which imports some of the U.K.’s best work for brief summer runs. The venue boasts three separate playing spaces. Theater A, on the ground floor, seats 196 people; upstairs are the 98-seat Theater B and a 70-seat black-box space, Theater C.

The Lyceum is Broadway's oldest continually operating legitimate space. Built by producer-manager David Frohman in 1903, it was purchased in 1940 by a conglomerate of producers which included George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart (co-authors of You Can't Take It with You and other comedies). In 1950, the Shuberts took ownership of the Lyceum, and still operate it. Alan Bates played the lovely 922-seat playhouse in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1957), and four years later, he returned in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker (1961). More recently, the venue was home to I Am My Own Wife and Neil LaBute's Reasons to Be Pretty.

The Tank, an adventurous multimedia performing-arts collaborative and talent incubator, spent years wandering from venue to venue, including a long stint in a small upstairs space on 46th Street. In 2017, it moved into the Midtown digs formerly occupied by Abingdon Theatre Company. Its two main spaces are the 98-seat June Havoc Theater and the 56-seat Dorothy Strelsin Theater. Meghan Finn is the company's longtime artistic director.

This dance center offers classes in ballet, modern dance, contemporary, jazz, theater, hip-hop, house, tap, salsa, flamenco, African, tai chi, sword fighting and yoga.

When the Shubert brothers opened it for business in 1911, the Winter Garden was heralded as a music hall "devoted to novel, international, spectacular and musical entertainments." It's current longtime occupant, Mamma Mia!, certainly fits the bill. Before that, from 1982 to 2000, Cats prowled the halls. The 1,498-seat space (with one of the larger Broadway stages and a relatively low proscenium arch) will probably have audiences shaking their booties to "Dancing Queen" for a good 10 or 15 years to come.

After losing the lease on his Soho space in 2010, after nearly three decades there, Robert Lyons moved to the landmarked Archive building in teh West Village. The new space, home to the summer Ice Factory Festival and much more, remains an indispensable theatrical crucible.

Best known as an avant-garde theater space, the Kitchen also offers experimental dance by inventive, often provocative artists.

Walk into this revolution-red theater—with its narrow First Floor Theater, its spectacularly barnlike next-door Ellen Stewart Theatre and the groovy attic Club Theater—and you are transported back in time to the New York scene's ’60s heyday. The mama herself, the late Ellen Stewart, first opened La MaMa's doors in 1961; it has since produced major figures like Tadeusz Kantor, Andrei Serban and Ping Chong, along with younger multicultural, dance-theater and avant-garde artists. 

With only 60 seats, this East Village hole-in-the wall has become both a rehearsal and performance space for New York Theatre Workshop, whose offices and mainstage are just next door. The black box frequently hosts smaller-scale shows by both NYTW and outside companies.

The Philip Coltoff Center (PCC), located in Greenwich Village, has been around since 1982 and has gone through several reconstructions. However, its mission to "enrich the social, cultural, intellectual and creative lives of the children, families and community at large" has remained the same. In addition to a nursery school, day care, children's art classes and after-school programs, the PCC houses performance spaces. These include a 120-seat theater, an auditorium with the capacity for 250 people and a gymnasium as well. The PCC is home to the New Acting Company, which performs shows for children and teens. Philip Coltoff, after whom the center is named, is the special advisor and former CEO and Executive Director of the Children's Aid Society, one of the oldest and largest nonprofit agencies serving children in the country.

Part of the gaggle of theaters on East 4th Street, the 99-seat Kraine is part of the loosely affiliated Horse Trade theaters (which also include the Red Room and UNDER St. Marks), where irreverent, independent work bubbles incessantly. The venue—a sweet proscenium with creaky, back-crippling red velvet seats—can also be rented, so it's difficult to pin the spot down in terms of a unified aesthetic.

The Gerald W. Lynch Theater, named after John Jay College's third president and which opened its doors in 1988, is a 605-seat theater and cultural resource for both the college and the New York City community at large.