Broadway box office fell back to earth last week following the previous week’s best-Thanksgiving-ever skyrocket numbers. With two additional shows on board raising the number of productions to 38, total attendance held virtually the same at 299,411 tickets sold, while receipts of $37,805,785 were down 12% from the big $43M holiday haul.
Look to average ticket prices for the fall: Thanksgiving week saw an average seat going for $144, while the Broadway season’s Week 27 ending Dec. 2 saw an average price of $126.
Recent big-name arrivals Network and To Kill A Mockingbird more than weathered the post-turkey slide. Director Ivo van Hove’s Network, starring Bryan Cranston, Tony Goldwyn and Tatiana Maslany, was SRO at the Belasco, grossing 100% of potential with $1,097,763, while Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird at the Shubert, directed by Bartlett Sher and starring Jeff Daniels, took in $1,336,030, filling 100% of seats.
Also in previews was jukebox musical The Cher Show, holding steady at the Neil Simon with a solid $1,075,110, and filling about 94% of seats.
A pair of holiday season specialties are sharing space at the Marquis Theatre, with The Illusionists – Magic of the Holidays pulling $904,020 for eight performances and filling about 75% of seats. The Mondays-only Celebrity Autobiography, in which celebs read other celebs memoirs to comic effect, grossed a small $41,882, with average ticket price of $31 keeping receipts at just 23% of potential. Still, attendance of 1,336 kept the 81%-filled theater free of echoes.
Other Broadway notables of the week:
- King Kong was steady, attendance-wise, with 10,280 ticket-buyers filling 73% of seats, but an average ticket price of $92 sending box office down to $943,850, a fall of nearly $260,000 from the previous week;
- Tourist-friendly School of Rock was down $622,687 from the holiday week, taking $733,387, about half of potential;
- Summer, the Donna Summer musical at the Lunt-Fontanne that recently announced its closing and an upcoming tour, grossed just 35% of potential, with $511,550;
- The Prom, the musical that got a big Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade kiss, played to 80%-filled houses at the Longacre, with total receipts of $556,473, about half of potential.
Season to date, Broadway has grossed $953,003,068, up 16% over last year at this time. Attendance of 7,436,744 was up 8%
All figures courtesy of the trade group Broadway League.
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