Female-Led Broadway Startup Shaking Up Theater Ticket Sales

Broadway Roulette, a new consumer-facing business founded and funded by women, is trying to revolutionize the theatergoing experience — making it more affordable and ideally a lot more fun.

The platform allows users to secure tickets, costing no more than $59 each, up to three months in advance. While customers can set preferences and check off several shows they aren’t interested in, there’s always an element of surprise as they don’t find out what they’re seeing until the day of.

“On the morning of the show, we ‘spin the wheel’ and match you with a show that wasn’t something you eliminated,” CEO Elizabeth Durand Streisand tells The Hollywood Reporter. “You’re taking a gamble. It’s a game. You don’t know what show you’re going to see. But every time you ‘spin,’ we give you a new show. We have customers who have literally seen every single show on Broadway using our service.”

She adds: “If you do the math, you can almost see every show on Broadway for the cost of one ticket to Hamilton on StubHub if you use our service enough times.”

Durand Streisand says she had the idea for the New York-based company when a friend visited her a few years back. “One of my old sorority sisters came to visit and asked me, ‘Hey, can you get me a single ticket to any musical that isn’t Phantom of the Opera that’s under $100?’ That’s when the light turned on,” she recalls. “It was one of those come-to-Jesus moments where I was like, ‘Oh, there has to be other people who also don’t care what musical they see, except they don’t want to see Phantom of the Opera for whatever reason.'”

On a whim, Durand Streisand — a veteran entertainment journalist — built a website and, in between covering red carpets and celebrity events, started to (literally) knock on Broadway doors.

“I had been running this business in between celebrity reporting gigs by going into box offices. It was tough,” she recounts, adding that the “thick skin” she developed as a reporter helped her persevere. “It was a lot of calling general managers and being like, ‘Hi, yeah. I’m Liz and that’s my article you’re reading in Us Weekly. But also, I’m running this company and you should come meet with me.'”

Durand Streisand says getting general managers and producers to take meetings — and finding acceptance among the theater community, in general — was initially a struggle. But, after about eight months of hustling, her hard work finally paid off in the summer of 2016 when she scored her first considerable deal with Jersey Boys.

“The day that I gave birth to my son, I actually closed my first official deal with Jersey Boys. That was the moment it became real,” she says. “It was a real show, it had been open a long time and we had made a deal with a management company that everybody respected. Nobody wants to be first to the party, but nobody wants to be last. We could say, ‘We’re working with Jersey Boys,’ and that made the conversation much easier.”

Since making what she calls an “imperative” breakthrough with Jersey Boys, Durand Streisand has signed deals with many major shows, and independently sources tickets to hard-to-see shows like Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen to ensure that every show on Broadway is in the roulette. Now, she’s focused on catering to theater’s majority female consumers.

Like many industries, Broadway has historically been a bit of a boys club. In the last year, women accounted for only 38 percent of company managers, 37 percent of principal roles and 19 percent of directors. Though the majority of high-profile posts in theater are held by men, 66 percent of tickets are purchased by women. “It’s not unusual to have an industry where men are traditionally in decision-making roles, but women are the consumers. That’s been true of the beauty space and many other industries. Theater is just one of them,” says Durand Streisand, who emphasizes that “female customers have different priorities.”

“For example, women never want anything to go to waste. We have customers who can’t use their tickets and feel guilty because they want someone else to go in their place,” she says. “We always find a home for those tickets. We know that’s important to women.”

With the support of other women, Durand Streisand is hoping to shake up the industry dynamic for the better. Former actress and talk show host Jesse Draper, now of Halogen Ventures, and Facebook Live creator Randi Zuckerberg are among Broadway Roulette’s early investors who are passionate about closing the gender gap. The company is also part of Morgan Stanley’s Multicultural Innovation Lab, a startup accelerator focused on female- and minority-led businesses poised to disrupt industries. 

“Building programming into our system that prioritizes women’s needs has been the result of having people like Randi and Jesse involved from the beginning,” says Durand Streisand. “There’s a lot of girl power here at Broadway Roulette and I’m proud of that.”

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