Say you’re planning an nice night out on the town this week. Naturally—because we live in a mobile-obsessed age—you turn to the arsenal of apps on your phone for ideas. Fandango: “Maybe I’ll watch a movie.” OpenTable: “Or make a reservation at a fancy restaurant.” Uber: “I’ll definitely take a car to get there, since I’m treating myself.”

Would you think of going to the theater? Probably not, and that’s precisely what Brian Fenty is on a mission to change. As the chairman and cofounder of TodayTix, which makes an eponymous mobile app that sells “week-of” theater tickets, Fenty wants to raise the profile of Broadway to a level of awareness that makes it top-of-mind as an option for last-minute entertainment among even the most oblivious millennials.

There’s certainly a market opportunity. The global theater industry generates tens of billions of dollars in revenue each year. That puts theater in comparable territory to the global film industry, which according to the MPAA made $36.4 billion in revenue in 2014. Yet approximately twenty percent of tickets go unsold on Broadway, and about thirty percent go unsold in London’s West End, TodayTix says.

Fenty, who has deep ties to the professional arts world, including working as one of Broadway’s youngest producers when he was 23, has some ideas about why so many tickets are left on the table: an aging audience, high ticketing fees, and basically no big technological innovations to speak of. So in 2013, he and Merritt Baer, a friend and another Broadway enthusiast, got together and created TodayTix.

“What we’re trying to do is be the theater app for the everyman,” Fenty tells WIRED. “If TodayTix can bring theater to a broader demographic, then we’re accomplishing our goals.”

On Broadway

A year-and-a-half after TodayTix’s launch in New York, Fenty says theatergoers buy one ticket per minute on the company’s app. It has 425,000 users, he says, and offers more than forty Broadway and Off-Broadway shows in the Big Apple. Today, after a period of beta testing in London, the company is officially expanding into the famous West End theater district with tickets to more than forty West End shows at launch. Fenty says TodayTix’s goal is to move into additional US cities by the end of 2015, including Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.

It’s a smart gamble. In 2013, the Broadway League—the national trade association for the Broadway theater industry in New York—released a report that found mobile ticket purchases made up less than 1 percent of tickets sold on Broadway during the 2012-2013 season.

Meanwhile, mobile commerce is steadily on the rise as the smartphone becomes central to so many of our interactions in the outside world. In a new report, research outfit eMarketer estimates mobile commerce sales will near $77 billion in 2015, up 32.2 percent from 2014. And that number is projected to keep growing.

Bringing In New Audiences

The decision to make TodayTix a mobile-first app ties in with Fenty’s aim to bring more bodies—especially a younger audience—into the theater. “You go into a show, and you see the gray hair and everything else,” Fenty says. “The theater hasn’t been this mainstream cultural option.”

Fenty thinks a huge part of why theater hasn’t been attracting these audiences is the complicated ticketing process. Right now, there are a slew of sites that purport to sell discounted tickets but, Fenty says they can be confusing. It’s hard to tell if you’re getting a broker who’s charing you a high markup.

You could get a ticket directly from the box office, but that means already knowing what you want to see.

Closest to TodayTix’s model is TKTS—the famed last-minute ticket booths in Times Square and elsewhere in New York—which Fenty calls “a great institution.”

“But you have to stand in the line in the sun, rain, or cold to get your tickets,” he says.

Skewing Young

According to the Broadway League, 40 percent of all theater tickets were purchased within the week of the show date in 2014, which made “week-of” a no-brainer for the TodayTix team. And they say it’s catching on. The company says its average customer age is 32—twelve years younger than the average Broadway-goer. And these younger audiences are going to more shows, TodayTix says: its average customer is seeing six shows in a year, compared to the overall Broadway average of four shows.

“Theater is one of those amazing things where everything is immediate,” he says.

“The whole concept that when you see a show, an actor can forget a line, a costume could malfunction and the audience is different every night … there are few things in our world that you can engage with at that level.”