Taffy Brodesser-Akner, in a lovely piece about the Broadway show “Operation Mincemeat” for the New York Times, “Why on Earth Have I Seen the Same Broadway Show 13 Times? An Investigation.”:

The tension I hold isn’t between my professionalism and the joys of fandom; it’s between the deadness of the culture and the surprise and joy of genuine originality. There is still a vestige of my brain that is fighting to save me, to defeat the doldrums of passive consumption by dragging me to fight for active passion. I can defeat those doldrums: Any day but Monday, I can stand right up from my desk and walk right over a few blocks and sit right down in a single seat and stare at the theater’s cadmium yellow curtain, trying not to face down the ridiculous crisis I have found myself in — which is that when I’m in this theater, I am happy and engaged, and when I’m not, I feel that I am useless and living in a world that seems intent on smothering the light that keeps out the dark.

That last line is a lyric from “Operation Mincemeat.”

I never found a show I was quite as enthusiastic about, but in my early 20s, when I lived in New York, I worked for a Broadway-adjacent company and got to see a lot of theater for free or cheap. There are a handful of shows I liked so much I saw them repeatedly: “In the Heights” (five times), “The Bridges of Madison County” (four times, somehow), “The Book of Mormon” (three times), “Altar Boyz” (three times, maybe?).

Brodesser-Akner doesn’t dwell on this aspect in her piece, but it can be overwhelming to see a particularly good (or complicated) musical for the first time. But getting to see a piece of live theater multiple times, in a familiar physical space, with real people performing, is an absolute joy, and you get just a little bit closer to how the people making the work are thinking about it.

But another thing Brodesser-Akner doesn’t mention is how expensive this has become. I got to see these things over and over sometimes through my job, and other times through same-day rush ticketing (I remember seeing Pippin from the first row center balcony for $25 during a snowstorm). NYC ticket prices are so out of control now, and rush/lottery tickets so hard to come by, that you need to be pretty choosy about seeing a show even once.