Omi-Sensei and I are in New York!

We focused the first part of our trip on… Broadway! Omi-Sensei wanted to see some musicals! We started with Fun Home, the story of a lesbian cartoonist who grew up in a funeral home, and her relationship with her father. It was beautiful!

We had gotten those tickets in advance, but we wanted more. And in case you’ve never heard of it, there’s this thing in New York where shows have lotteries for cheap tickets. So, we decided to enter several, but we were especially hoping to win tickets to Hamilton. Some shows have digital lotteries, so you find out the results through email. We didn’t win.

Then we read online that 10,000 people enter the online lottery for Hamilton every day. So, we decided to go to the Hamilton theatre for the Wednesday matinee and try our luck at the once weekly in-person lottery. There were A LOT of people there, with a line around the block. Spoiler alert — we didn’t win again. However, Hamilton does this thing called #Ham4Ham, where they reward the people who came to the lottery with a mini sidewalk concert. So, despite a little rain, and not winning, we got to see Rory O’Malley from Hamilton introduce Cynthia Erivo, the Tony award winning singer who is currently starring in the Color Purple. She sung us a Beyonce song before we found out we lost. Pretty fun anyway!

Even though we entered 10+ lotteries (two in person and the rest online) we didn’t win any. However, we wandered up to the box office at School of Rock, and happened to arrive in time to get $27 “standing room only” tickets. What a fun show! It’s about a teacher (so perfect for Omi-Sensei and me), and we eventually snagged seats for the second half.

Our last Broadway musical was an oldie but a goodie. It’s now the 10th longest running show on Broadway, and I still had never seen it — Wicked! After we lost that in-person lottery, the box office decided to offer a deal to everyone in line for remaining tickets. So, we snagged some of those, and off we went.

So far, we haven’t seen the Statue of Liberty, Greenwich Village, or many other major tourist attractions in New York. We realized that even if we stayed a week, we wouldn’t see it all. Instead, we enjoyed a little slice of life here, mostly in the land of musicals. We did see a few other sites, like Central Park and Times Square, but today we’ll wander a little further from Broadway.