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.
Two years after Stephen Sondheim died, at 91, the composer-lyricist’s musicals are more popular than ever. Merrily, with a book by Sondheim’s Company collaborator George Furth, tells a poignant story about youth’s dashed dreams and friendships, going backwards in time, set to Sondheim’s jaunty score. It’s evolved from short-lived 1981 flop to often-revised almost-ran to a hit-in-the-making.
Capitalized at $12 million, the revival is raising prices so fast, critics on social media can’t keep up. “Insane to think Merrily on Broadway has $699 tickets,” U.K. blogger Carl Woodward tweeted last week. “Some people won’t earn that in a month. We can’t afford to price a generation of theatre goers out like this.”
“Why stop at $699?” playwright David Adjmi (Stereophonic) added on the X platform. “If three people shell out $500k a night you can stop building audiences and have private showings.”
The show’s presented by Sonia Friedman, with David Babani, Patrick Catullo and Jeff Romley. Sonia Friedman Productions is a subsidiary of the giant Ambassador Theatre Group, which controls the Hudson Theatre and handles its ticketing. The producers declined to comment for this story via spokesman Matt Polk.
Merrily prices are remarkably variable. Tenth-row orchestra tickets sell for $439 (including online fees) for Tuesday, Dec. 19, and include a glass of Prosecco served in a private lounge; the same seats go for $899 for the previous Saturday night, without perquisites. Upstairs, a fourth-row balcony seat that’s $287 for December 16 drops to $134 for February 20.
Tip: there usually are good orchestra seats available in the neighborhood of $200 shortly before curtain. And for what it’s worth, balcony tickets were as low as $59, before fees, when the show went on sale.
Merrily has come a long way since the original production, when the most expensive ticket was $35 ($115 inflation-adjusted). Staged by Hal Prince, with teenagers and young adults playing all the parts, it chronicles three friends whose relationship suffers as they age from idealistic college students to embittered forty-somethings. It closed after 16 regular performances and ended Prince and Sondheim’s extraordinary, decade-long collaboration, which produced Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures and Sweeney Todd.
The new Merrily — starring Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez and Daniel Radcliffe and directed by Maria Friedman — is raking in operating profits. It has running costs of about $950,0000 and grossed $1.9 million last week, of which about $1.7 million is available to Old Friends Broadway LP. (The production doesn’t retain credit card commissions and other fees.) Its average ticket, $244, was the highest on Broadway.
Merrily’s top prices aren’t yet record-setting. Hamilton and recent revivals of Hello, Dolly! and Plaza Suite sold tickets for more. Merrily‘s secondary market seems to be relatively muted, perhaps because the primary market prices discourage resellers, and “delayed delivery”: ATG waits until 48 hours before the relevant performance to email online customers their tickets.
Aggressive holiday pricing is endemic on Broadway and predates fluctuating top tickets, which began with The Producers, in 2001. The Lion King opened in November 1997 and has been selling at or near capacity ever since. For the Dec. 30 evening performance, Disney is charging $243.50 for last row of the mezzanine of the Minskoff Theatre and as much as $552.50 for front orchestra — double The Lion King prices for quieter weeks in New York.
Merrily arguably has a responsibility to its investors to strike while the iron is hot to recoup its costs.
Like other tourist-dependent industries, Broadway has had a good thing going by charging the highest prices during the busiest weeks. But many in the business privately fret that stiff prices reinforce the notion that seeing a Broadway show is a luxury, reserved for special occasions.
Correction: Relying on an outdated Securities and Exchange filing, this story originally reported that the show was capitalized at $13 million.
