Broadway Box-Office Grosses Look Encouraging

Chip DeFFaa, Editor-at-Large

So how is Broadway doing right now, in terms of ticket sales and attendance?  Not bad at all, all things considered….  There are currently 24 shows running on Broadway.  Last week, overall, the shows sold about $22 million dollars’ worth of tickets, with 176,083 tickets sold.  The 24 shows now open are running at 85% capacity, with the average ticket price about $126.   (That’s the average–meaning that there were some tickets sold at higher prices, with some rush tickets, twofers, and other discounted tix available for less.)

All in all, the box-office grosses are better than many had feared they might be right now, considering the impact of the pandemic, and the greatly reduced tourist trade.  But for all who love theater, those latest collective grosses (courtesy of the Broadway League, for the week ending October 24th, 2021) are encouraging.

These are the 24 shows that are currently running on Broadway: Ain’t Too Proud; Aladdin; Caroline, or Change; Chicago; Chicken & Biscuits; Come From Away; Dana H.; David Byrne’s American Utopia; Freestyle Love Supreme; Girl From the North Country; Hadestown; Hamilton; Is This a Room; Jagged Little Pill; Lackawanna Blues; The Lehman Trilogy; The Lion King; Moulin Rouge! The Musical!; Mrs. Doubtfire; The Phantom of the Opera; Thoughts of a Colored Man; Tina: The Tina Turner Musical; To Kill a Mockingbird; Six; Waitress; and Wicked.

Box-office grosses for individual shows are not being made public right now.  So all I can report are the collective grosses and attendance figures for Broadway as a whole.  But for all members of the theater community, there’s some good news in the figures that are available.

Box-office grosses might not be of interest to a lot of people, but they’ve interested me since I was a kid.  I was mentored by an aged ex-vaudevillian named Todd Fisher, who’d go over the weekly grosses for theater and film carefully.  He’d say to me: “Let’s look at The Variety, and see what the grosses are.”  (He always referred to Variety–the showbiz newspaper–as “The Variety.”)  And I picked up a sense from him that these numbers mattered.