You can get New York's champagne culture on a beer budget

Seat V-111 in Avery Fisher Hall is 21 rows from the stage, just to the right of center and six seats off the aisle. Also known as: the sweetest spot in town to witness a concert by the great New York Philharmonic orchestra. Seat V-111 costs $109 most evenings, a price that, while steepish, virtually guarantees a memorable evening of classical fireworks. And all this, my friends, can be yours for the unbelievably low price of ... $16.

"Take your seats, please," we heard on a recent rainy Wednesday morning, an unseen announcer's voice appropriately hoarse for 9:45. We'd gathered at Fisher, hundreds of us, to witness what the Philharmonic calls an open rehearsal, which was both the reason our seat was so cheap and a borderline hilarious misnomer. Yes, one did have to deal with the sight of orchestra members in jeans, and that can be a bit of a shock, depending on the player and the brand of jeans selected. But the rehearsals aren't anything like the stop-start affairs you might be imagining.

Orchestra players were still setting up — marking their scores, waving daffily to friends in the audience — when superstar pianist Mitsuko Uchida mounted the stage in what appeared to be a pair of sweatpants, albeit of the designer variety. And then, with hardly a nod to guest conductor Riccardo Muti, she hurled herself into a $109 performance (and then some) of Ravel's Concerto in G, a bravura morning show that elicited audience cheers of the sort one seldom hears this side of Saturday night.

Granted, the orchestra did rework a few passages of another composition on that week's program. But such moments felt like a bonus to these attendees, who relished the rare glimpse behind the curtain.

Art for free

A few days later, we detected a similar sense of relief on the faces at the Museum of Modern Art. It was Friday afternoon, when tickets to that shrine to Pollock and Johns and Warhol are not $20 but ... zero dollars, a once-a-week 100 percent markdown. Given that, you don't exactly get the place to yourself, but MoMA is so large it seems to take its hordes in stride.

Cheap seats at The Met

Next up were cheap seats at the Metropolitan Opera.

"You see that woman over there?," said a man named John Bright the following evening. The 20-something music student was next to us in the standing-room stalls at the Met. He handed over his binoculars. "She's got this yuck-blue dress on."

No ... no ... Wait. I do.

"Can you imagine what this evening cost for her?"

Post-performance research confirmed that Ms. Yuck's seat was $375 (plus who knows how many fashion points). Our evening, by comparison, which consisted of a stellar performance of Verdi's "Rigoletto" set us back a mere $15. And what did Ms. Yuck get for paying 25 times as much? The privilege of sitting approximately a hundred feet closer to the stage.

At which point the curtain opened on a 16th-century Italian court, a hunchbacked jester and a timeless story of dignity found and lost. The singing was thrilling, even from a distance, and Bright was more than once brought to the verge of tears.

"I never win the lottery, but I don't let it stop me," he told us at intermission, still shaken, speaking not of Powerball but the Met's weekly ticket lottery, a promotion that the board of the recession-slammed opera company dreamed up earlier this year. Hundreds enter online every week for the chance to buy some of the best weekend seats in the house that remain unsold at the start of the week.

The "Hair" lottery

"I know you love 'Hair,' but I love 'Hair,' too," said a man in front of the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, where a hot-ticket Broadway revival of the 1968 musical recently opened. The man (who, interestingly, was bald) had descended on the theater not to have non-arguments like this with fellow Broadway babies but to join a mob about 60 strong and hellbent on getting into the Saturday matinee. It was almost noon, and yet another New York lottery was about to begin, this one for the 28 box seats that "Hair" producers set aside for each performance for day-of sale.

The price — $25 a seat, and winners can buy up to two — is less than a fourth of the top ticket price, but to win, a show staffer has to pick your name out of a big white paint bucket. More and more Broadway shows are offering their own versions of this "Be-In Box" lottery, and the tickets are invariably a steal.

Believe it or not, we who never win things actually won this time, blurting out "woo hoo" or something of the sort, to the general consternation of other nearby hopefuls. We forked over our 25 bucks and scrambled into the balcony box.

For 2 1/2 hours we frolicked in a world of peace, love, freedom and waxen-flaxen populism. Funny, the "Hair" score sounded quaint, even cornball, just a few years ago. Then again, so did standing-room at the opera; so did attending a morning philharmonic concert. But that was before we rediscovered the financial urgency of such endeavors.