Deadline Hollywood
At The Broadway B.O., Sales Rocket As Audience Lags In Sellers’ Market
by Jeremy Gerard
November 13, 2017 3:40pm
For the moment, the pre-holiday season looks swell, especially with Uma Thurman (in Beau Willimon’s The Parisian Woman) and Amy Schumer (in Steve Martin’s Meteor Shower) joining Bette Midler and Bruce Springsteen on the gold-paved Street where we live. So good, in fact, that this week we’re going to give you twoTop 5 charts, one for musicals and one for non-musicals. The mere fact that there are enough plays on Broadway at the moment to require their own visual aid is remarkable all by itself.
Seventeen of the 30 running shows were up $100K or more. Of course that included Midler’s return from a week off, bumping Hello, Dolly! by a cool $1.47 million to $2.35 million at the Shubert Theatre, where the average ticket brought $210.26. It also included a jump of $151.65K for Waitress as pop star Jason Mraz came on board the Sara Bareilles tuner at the Nederlander Organization’s Brooks Atkinson, where it rejoined the $1 million club and tickets were averaging $133.87.
Julie Taymor’s revival of M. Butterfly, starring Clive Owen, continues to improve in the face of some middling reviews; it leapt $83.58K to $661.5K at the Shuberts’ Cort, with tickets averaging $97.16. New to the preview club were SpongeBob SquarePants, at the Nederlanders’ Palace, where 85 percent of the seats were filled for seven performances, average ticket price $63.68, and a revival of that musical charmer Once On This Island, at Circle in the Square, where every seat was filled for six previews at $90.63 on average.
The five top-grossing shows were:
• Hamilton ($3.14 million at the Nederlanders’ Richard Rodgers; $292.14 average ticket)
• Springsteen on Broadway ($2.39 million at Jujamcyn Theatres’ Walter Kerr; five performances; $505.39)
• Hello, Dolly! ($2.35 million at the Shubert; $210.26)
• The Lion King ($1.91 million at the Nederlanders’ Minskoff; $140.70)
• Dear Evan Hansen ($1.68 million at the Shuberts’ Music Box; $210.31)
The five top-grossing plays were:
• Meteor Shower ($1 million at the Shuberts’ Booth; eight previews; $161.11 average ticket)
• M. Butterfly ($661.47K at at the Shuberts’ Cort; $97.16)
• Junk ($602.36K at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont; $87.07)
• The Parisian Woman ($579.8K at the Ambassador Theatre Group’s Hudson; five previews; $121.72)
• The Play What Goes Wrong ($435.3K at the Shuberts’ Lyceum; $79.84)
Ticket sales for Week 25 of the 2017-2018 Broadway season totaled $32.48 million for 30 shows, a hike of $5.2 million, or 19 percent, over Week 24, according to the trade group Broadway League. Average ticket price rose to $129.49 from $121.37.
