Maybe Happy Ending achieved an unlikely Broadway rebound.
During previews last fall, the beguiling one-act musical about love and loss in the digital age failed to crack $300,000 a week at the box office. It likely lost money every week for its first 10 weeks at the Belasco Theatre, based on an early production document estimating that it needed published weekly box office grosses of about $820,000 to break even. Few shows recover from a deficit that daunting.Continue Reading
Jonathan Groff is scheduled to perform twice at the Tony Awards on Sunday. The enviable television exposure should confirm his show, Just in Time, as the most commercially successful new musical to-date of the 2024-25 Broadway season.
Groff, 40, who was Tony-nominated for playing King George III in Hamilton, will join other original company members to mark 10 lucrative years on Broadway; and lead Just in Time, in which Groff plays the 1950s and ’60s singer-songwriter-actor Bobby Darin. Last week, the average ticket price at Circle in the Square –which Derek McLane refashioned as a faux nightclub — was $213.52. That’s the highest average ticket price of any musical now on Broadway.Continue Reading
EXCLUSIVE: Good Night, and Good Luck has repeatedly set weekly records as the highest-grossing play in Broadway history. Nonetheless, the George Clooney blockbuster projected it will qualify for a $2.5 million subsidy from New York State, according to a production operating agreement distributed to investors.
Glengarry Glen Ross, the hit revival starring Kieran Culkin, expects $1.9 million from the state. Othello, which charges as much as $921 to see Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, projected $2 million in state aid.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
Producers Orin Wolf and Greg Nobile are preparing to move the acclaimed dance piece Illinoise to the St. James Theater, packing another new musical into the busy 2023-24 season.
The transfer from the Park Avenue Armory — where Illinoise is scheduled to play its final, sold-out performance on March 26 — would be so quick that the show may not have time for previews on Broadway, industry sources said. To be eligible for Tony Awards this year, productions must open by April 25. Continue Reading
The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which has been busy organizing off-Broadway, has turned its attention to downtown Manhattan’s most storied and prolific producer.
On Wednesday, the management of the Public Theater declined a request by production workers at the 70-year-old institution to voluntarily recognize their petition to unionize under IATSE. In response, a group calling itself “Unionize the Public” posted on Instagram that it will seek an election supervised by a third party.Continue Reading
The producers of Merrily We Roll Along have raised the revival’s top ticket price to $899 — the most expensive seat on Broadway so far this season.
The $899 tickets, which include a $50 fee for buying online, are for some orchestra and mezzanine seats in the Hudson Theatre for a handful of weekend performances in December. In this era of “dynamic pricing,” the move reflects strong demand heading into the holidays.Continue Reading
It doesn’t suck to be David Stone today.
Nineteen years after the satiric Avenue Q (“It Sucks to Be Me”) upset the Stone-produced blockbuster Wicked at the Tony Awards, the 56-year-old won his first Best Musical Tony, for Kimberly Akimbo, and his second for best play revival, Suzan Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog.Continue Reading
Hamilton producer Jeffrey Seller is raising as much as $14.5 million to revive Sweeney Todd on Broadway this spring, a test of whether a big-budget Stephen Sondheim revival can succeed in the post-Sondheim era.
Josh Groban (The Great Comet) will play the vengeful barber and Annaleigh Ashford (Sunday in the Park with George) will play the creative pie maker Mrs. Lovett, according to an operating agreement distributed to investors and reviewed by Broadway Journal. The musical, with a book by Hugh Wheeler, will be staged by Hamilton director Thomas Kail with a full orchestra playing the score, a person familiar with the revival said. (Two prior Broadway revivals, while critically acclaimed, were comparatively small-scale productions.)Continue Reading
In 2020, a year in which theaters were dark for nine and a half months, Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar Eustis earned $1.15 million in pay and benefits, more than any other nonprofit theater leader in New York.
Eustis’ 10 percent jump in overall compensation — disclosed in the Public’s 2020-21 tax return filed with the New York Attorney General — runs counter to the company’s messaging about pandemic pay. In an April 2020 New York Times story about the cancellation of Shakespeare in the Park and planned staff furloughs, Michael Paulson reported that much of the remaining staff “will take up to a 25 percent pay cut. Eustis will take a 40 percent pay cut.”
The tax return, which details compensation for calendar year 2020, tells a different story. Eustis, one of the highest-profile figures in nonprofit theater since assuming leadership of the storied organization in 2005, was paid $901,000, up from $807,000 in 2019. Benefits and deferred pay were valued at an additional $255,000.Continue Reading
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