How Broadway and NYC Are Getting Students to Theater for Just $10 — and Inspiring the City’s Youth (Exclusive)

Nora Kouyate has only seen two Broadway productions. The 15-year-old student at University Heights High School in the Bronx said that for a long time, she hadn't even considered paying the often exorbitant prices required for theater tickets. After seeing Back to the Future: The Musical with her classmates through Broadway Bridges, she feels a bit differently. 

"Honestly, it was amazing," Kouyate told The Messenger about the musical. "The way that everything just lit up, the way everything vibed, the lights, the music, all of the song and dance."

Kouyate added that she had seen the classic '80s sci-fi film from which the musical is adapted and, after revisiting it following the Broadway experience, she found that the film paled in comparison to the stage spectacle. 

"Especially at the end, when the car went up in the air, and it went upside down, I was like, 'What the hell? How did they do that?'" Kouyate recalled. "And then all of the song and dance just brought a whole different energy to it — the way the characters talk, the way they engage, it just made a show worth watching."

The other show she had seen with her class was Hamilton, which she was also impressed by, but said Back to the Future was "just on another level."

"And then, I always thought about how Broadway plays were, like, super expensive, but now I would not mind paying a couple $100 to see that again," she said. 

The Broadway League, in partnership with NYC Public Schools and the United Federation of Teachers, with support from the New York City Council, runs Broadway Bridges, an initiative that aims to offer every New York City public high school student the opportunity to attend a Broadway show prior to graduation.

Since its inception in 2017, Broadway Bridges has offered NYC public schools in all five boroughs $10 Broadway tickets for their 10th-grade students. To date, a total of 422 New York City public high schools and 100,000 students have been served by the program. Twenty Broadway shows participated in the fall 2023 cycle, which runs from Oct. 10 to Dec. 14. 

It takes collaboration between various people and organizations who support this particular endeavor to establish the inventory and cover the finances for these $23 tickets, of which the students pay $10 and the League pays for $13. 

"We are working with our producers who have availability at certain times and offer those tickets. They feel like they're making an investment in the future," Broadway League president Charlotte St. Martin told The Messenger about the program. "We raise money through our foundation, and we get a lot of support from individual members and corporate members to help us make this happen."

St. Martin has been in this industry for a long time, so she knew from the beginning of Broadway Bridges that there wouldn't be clear, quantifiable evidence of the positive impact of making Broadway more accessible to students, she said. 

She estimated it would take more than a decade to offer hard data in this regard, but pointed to existing research that suggests many theatergoers — both on Broadway and elsewhere around the world — experienced Broadway as a child.  

"We know that by exposing youth to theater that the likelihood is they're going to attend theater as they get older, that they're going to do better in school, they're going to have higher chances of going to college, because the arts set up students to be more successful in life," St. Martin said. 

"We're seeing, incrementally each year, younger audiences. Now, obviously, we lost a couple of years [due to the COVID-19 pandemic], but that's where we were going. And it will also show that the audience is more diverse."

Kouyate exemplifies this mission. She previously described herself as someone who has always enjoyed theater, but admitted that she has never been one to sit through an entire stage production without getting distracted or tired. 

This time, even after a long school day and low on energy when she first walked into the Winter Garden Theatre, she said the production captured and held her attention for the entire two hours and 40 minutes. 

"Even [during] the intermission, I was so annoyed because I'm like, 'Can we get back to the good stuff?'" Kouyate said. "So this kind of just made me fall in love with theater again."

In addition to introducing students to the excitement and quality of a Broadway show, St. Martin noted that Broadway Bridges is also designed to be an interactive program that aims to open students' minds to the possibility of pursuing a career in the theater industry. 

Some of the cast and crew members hold talkbacks with the students after they have seen a show, and study guides for each show are offered to participating groups. The students and teachers are also referred to a website called Careers.Broadway, the Broadway League's educational resource for the more than 80 possible career paths in the theater industry — from performer to stage crew to production manager. 

"I personally never thought that I'd get the opportunity to see a Broadway show, especially something that extravagant," Kouyate said. "And I think it kind of opened us to all the opportunities that are available to us, because the lead [actor Casey Likes] — he was so young."

Kouyate explained that she expected to see an adult playing a teenager, and she was pleasantly surprised by the fact that someone relatively close to the age of her and her classmates (Likes is 21) was so successful. 

"That gives us that idea that this is something that we could aspire to, this is something that we can achieve, and it's going to keep us coming back," she said.

"Because that play really kind of took me to a whole other world in terms of theater, and it gave me more of an interest for it. And it's given me the drive to actually go see another Broadway play. Like it gives me that incentive because now I would definitely pay to go see something like that. And the fact that I got to see it for free — it was everything."

Broadway Bridges will resume in the Spring 2024 season.