When I first moved to New York City years ago, I went to a lot of Broadway shows.

My girlfriend was an actress, a lot of our friends were actors, and we would scrounge tickets for cheap or more often

we would second act the shows.

That's when you just walk in the theater at intermission and find an empty seat.

It's harder to do that these days.

And then in my first real journalism job

at New York magazine, I wrote about the theater,

good bit, and I was suddenly invited to become a voter for the Tony Awards.

I thought this was an honor of some kind.

It turned out to be more of a punishment because a Tony voter is supposed to see every show that's nominated for any category

which means you see a lot of theater that just isn't very good. I don't mean to be cruel. I know that everyone involved works really hard, but making

a great piece of theater, a great piece of anything, takes more than hard work. It takes talent and luck and endurance and something that feels like

alchemy. Anyway, after seeing 20 or 30 Broadway shows a year, many of them mediocre at best, I pretty much gave up on it.

I also stopped following the business side of theater which I had found fascinating and weird.

But I moved on.

It just felt like in a world of rapidly expanding entertainment options, Broadway had been left behind.

Meanwhile, the tickets kept getting more expensive. These days, the average Broadway ticket

costs over $125. The average household income of Broadway ticket

today is over $125. This steep inflation was actually

was actually predicted back in 1965 by a pair of economists

William Baumel and William Bowen. They published a paper called On the Performing Arts

the anatomy of their economic problems.

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