With concerns about Covid on the wane, aging theatergoers returned to Broadway last season, according to a new report by the Broadway League.
As the audience shrank modestly for every age group under 50 years old, ticket buyers who are 50 and up increased, according to the trade association’s new demographic study.Continue Reading
EXCLUSIVE: The highest-stakes succession race on Broadway appears to be over. Jeff T. Daniel is being positioned to take the reins at the Shubert Organization, Broadway’s largest landlord, people familiar with the company said.
Daniel joined Shubert in the newly created position of chief strategy officer in September 2023, recruited from the touring giant Broadway Across America. He’s also chairman of the government relations committee of the Broadway League trade association. He’s in line to succeed Robert E. Wankel, Shubert’s 78-year-old chairman and chief executive, who’s been at the company for 50 years.Continue Reading
EXCLUSIVE: The prolific production company Seaview plans to reopen the 296-seat venue that Second Stage relinquished, a vote of confidence for off-Broadway theater as nonprofit companies retrench.
Seaview, led by Greg Nobile and backed by Sony Music, will produce its own shows in the space, according to an application for a state liquor license filed with Manhattan Community Board 4. In 2024, Second Stage ended its lease for the Rem Koolhaas-designed theater, in the former bank building on 43rd Street and Eighth Avenue. Known as the Tony Kiser, Second Stage presented plays and musicals there, including developmental productions of Dear Evan Hansen and Next to Normal. Continue Reading
EXCLUSIVE: Signature Theatre Co. — which raised the bar off-Broadway by devoting entire seasons to the work of major dramatists while offering $25 tickets across the board — is struggling to stay afloat.
Lutz and Carr, the company’s auditor, said it has “substantial doubt about the organization’s ability to continue as a going concern.” The accountant’s alarm accompanies financial statements completed in August 2024 that were posted on the New York Attorney General’s charities registry during Christmas week.Continue Reading
EXCLUSIVE: Broadway’s box office union, which is in contract negotiations with the Broadway League, claims that the industry’s embrace of TodayTix Group represents an unfair labor practice.
The Treasurers and Ticket Sellers Union — Local 751 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees — accused the League and two of its largest landlord members, the Shubert and Nederlander Organizations, of “unilaterally changing terms and conditions of employment…concerning the distribution of theater tickets.” The complaint was filed with the National Labor Relations Board in connection with TodayTix, the 11-year-old, easy-to-use app for buying tickets to Broadway shows and other cultural events.Continue Reading
As Sleep No More prepares to close after a historic 12-year run, the producers of the immersive show are in an epic battle against their landlord.
Producers Arthur Karpati and Jonathan Hochwald owed $4.5 million in rent as of July 1, 2024, having guaranteed the payments on their West 27th Street lease, according to their landlord, Harlan Berger, in a sworn statement filed in New York Supreme Court. The debt has increased by about $500,000 a month, per court records.Continue Reading
EXCLUSIVE: Producers of Operation Mincemeat are raising at least $11.5 million to transfer the critically acclaimed, Olivier Award-winning musical to Broadway, according to financial documents. People familiar with the show said the plan is to open at the Golden Theatre early next year as part of the current, 2024/25, season.
The Golden is home to Stereophonic — the Tony Award-winning play about a fractious rock band making an album– which recently “extended by popular demand for a final time” to Jan. 12, 2025.Continue Reading
Broadway investors stand to lose about $200 million on the 2023-24 season’s flops. For Jujamcyn Theaters, the Broadway landlord, it was a different story.
Jujamcyn earned a profit of $34 million on revenue of $116 million in the year ending March 30, 2024. The disclosure, in a filing in the U.K. by Jujamcyn’s new parent, ATG Entertainment, is the first time in memory that a major commercial Broadway theater owner shared its financials.Continue Reading
EXCLUSIVE: Before the Public Theater fired a fifth of its staff, the downtown institution faced a financial crisis.
When it disclosed layoffs last July, the renowned nonprofit company said that it hoped to avoid a budget deficit in the year ending in August 2023. Instead, expenses exceeded revenue by $8 million that season, according to its most recent audited financial statement, which was obtained by Broadway Journal. That was the 70-year-old organization’s biggest budget deficit in at least a decade.Continue Reading
EXCLUSIVE: Newly minted Tony Award winner Jonathan Groff will play the 1950s and ’60s crooner Bobby Darin in a staged reading next month, ahead of a planned Broadway opening in spring 2025, people familiar with the musical said.Continue Reading
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