The Broadway musical comedy Some Like it Hot will close on Dec. 30, just over a year after the $19.5 million show opened. Producers emailed a closing notice tonight.
The lavish adaptation of the 1959 Billy Wilder movie was nominated for 13 Tony Awards and won four, including for lead actor J. Harrison Ghee and Casey Nicholaw’s choreography. But Hot is burdened with formidable running costs — it needs to sell at least $900,000 of tickets a week to pay its bills (that’s the published gross, or “gross gross”), according to a 2021 recoupment chart reviewed by Broadway Journal. It met that threshold in just 14 of its 47 weeks at the Shubert Theatre.
The Shubert Organization produced the show, with songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman recalling the big-band era and a savvy book by Matthew Lopez and Amber Ruffin. Nicholaw directed.
Other recent big-budget casualties include New York, New York, with songs by Fred Ebb, John Kander and Lin-Manuel Miranda and produced by Sonia Friedman and Tom Kirdahy for $25 million; Once Upon a One More Time, led by the Nederlander Organization and capitalized at $20 million; Almost Famous (produced by Lia Vollack and Michael Cassel, $18 million) and Bad Cinderella (Christine Schwarzman and the Really Useful Group, $19 million).
The $22 million David Byrne-Fatboy Slim musical Here Lies Love, which dramatizes the rise and fall of the Marcos regime, is currently struggling at the Broadway theater. It began previews on June 17 and appears to be losing money most weeks.
A Broadway bright spot is the $20 million & Juliet, with a score from the catalog of Swedish hitmaker Max Martin. Nearly a year into its run at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, it has higher sales and lower running costs than Hot and is gradually returning money to investors.
