Because the night belongs to the vaccinated.
Following the lead of Springsteen on Broadway, which is halfway through its summer run at the Walter Kerr, the Broadway League said it’s requiring audiences to show proof of vaccination at the district’s 41 theaters.Continue Reading
Bruce Springsteen’s summer engagement at the St. James Theatre will likely break Broadway records — but we may never know for sure.Continue Reading
Morrissey’s seven-night engagement at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre sold well in the first hour of general public availability, suggesting a bright future for rock stars on Broadway.
As of 11 am, scattered seats were available in the front orchestra for $399, or $424.70 with Ticketmaster fees, and for $279 in the mezzanine and rear orchestra. Tickets topped out at $850 for Bruce Springsteen, who ended 236 performances at the Walter Kerr in December. His shows went for thousands in the secondary market.Continue Reading
Broadway celebrated 2019 with a slew of milestones: highest-grossing week and year in history and best-attended week and year since at least 1984, according to the Broadway League.
Long-running shows such as Wicked ($3.4 million), The Lion King ($3.7 million) and Hamilton ($4 million) recorded their best sales last week and charged their highest average prices, with tourists continuing to flock to Broadway’s biggest brands.
Hamilton, whose composer-lyricist, Lin-Manuel Miranda, returns to the show next week for a short engagement in San Juan, Puerto Rico, became the first Broadway show to clear $4 million over eight performances.Continue Reading
Sales of Frozen and Mean Girls took a hit last week as schools reopened and Broadway contended with oppressive heat and competition from the latter rounds of the U.S. Open tennis championships in Queens.
Disney’s Frozen fell 16 percent to $1.6 million, the lowest since the adaptation of the 2013 animated movie opened in March. Mean Girls, produced by Lorne Michaels and the late Stuart Thompson and based on the Tina Fey movie, dropped 21 percent to $1.2 million, its weakest seven days since opening in April.Continue Reading
The Broadway season that ended on Sunday was strong but not stellar.
Overall attendance: up 4 percent to 13.8 million, according to the Broadway League. Grosses rose 17 percent, to $1.7 billion. The average price of a ticket for a musical gained 11 percent to $125.70 — thanks to strong demand for Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, The Lion King, Hello, Dolly! with Bette Midler and, increasingly, Mean Girls, which looks like a hit.
There’s New Year’s week, when the city is packed with tourists and many shows have nine performances, and then there’s every other week. Last week was a record for the latter.
Bruce Springsteen, Denzel Washington, Harry Potter, Frozen and spring break for public schools lifted Broadway to its highest-grossing week that didn’t coincide with the New Year’s holiday. It was the fifth-highest-grossing week in history.
Thanks to ever-rising prices, 2017 ended on a frosty high note.
It was Broadway’s best-selling year, at $1.64 billion; its top-grossing week — $50.4 million; and the best week for a single show: Hamilton, natch, at $3.9 million, aided by record $1,150 seats.
Sales overall for 2017 were up 20 percent, according to data from the Broadway League, a trade association of producers and theater owners. The average ticket ascended 16 percent to $119.
Broadway can be thankful for big-spending tourists, as grosses soared 11 percent from a year earlier in its bestselling Thanksgiving week ever.
Among the musicals posting weekly records were Hamilton, Hello, Dolly! with Bette Midler, Dear Evan Hansen, Come From Away and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Broadway in all sold $39 million, with an average seat of $147.50.
Hamilton took in $3.5 million, a 4 percent jump from the week ending on Jan 1, 2017. It was the highest-grossing seven days for any Broadway musical. Evan Hansen rose 16 percent from the week before to $2 million, even as Noah Galvin replaced Tony Award-winner Ben Platt in the lead. The average Evan Hansen ticket was $244, not too far behind Hamilton, at $321 .Continue Reading
The $8 million-plus to bring The Band’s Visit to Broadway looks like money well spent, based on its first full week of previews.
The David Yazbek and Itamar Moses musical set in a sleepy Israeli town grossed $769,000 — 84 percent of its potential. Attendance was 100 percent of capacity. The average ticket, at $105, was just 12 percent below the average of Dear Evan Hansen in its first week a year earlier, according to Broadway League data.
