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- [00:05]
A
You ask me for my motives. Well, you needn't be so smart. It's a business. It isn't making history. It isn't making art. It's a business. Shaw and Ibsen take em away. And don't bother me with Moliere. Those Russians? Never.
- [00:35]
B
Well, hello all you theater lovers both out and proud and on the DL. And welcome back to Broadway Breakdown, a podcast discussing the history un legacy of American theater's most exclusive address, Broadway. I am your host, Matt Koplik, the least famous and most opinionated of all the Broadway podcast hosts. And this is perhaps the last solo episode I record for for the foreseeable future. Unless any review episodes happen between now and the end of the year, which could happen. We are getting to the part where new shows are starting to open, but you know, not every press team is allowing for press seats. So we have to be financially responsible and crafty with how we go about seeing some of these things. If we cannot get the coveted complimentary tickets, which is, listen that those are bougie problems to have. But it does mean I have to be selective about what I see and how much I pay if I don't want to go broke. A couple bit of housekeeping notes before we move into the bulk of this episode, which is all about Broadway grosses moving forward. There are going to be more commercial breaks on Broadway Breakdown. I know I am not the biggest fan of commercial breaks either. They are annoying. But BPN has been nagging me that I don't do. They don't think I do enough of them. And they have been very not forceful. But they've really emphasized how I'm screwing myself over by not having more ad breaks. But I've been thinking about you guys and didn't want you to have constant interruptions to the episodes. I wanted you to sort of listen. The episodes are long enough as it is. You add on an extra 15 minutes of advertisements and all of a sudden we've got three hour episodes and half of them isn't even like the content. But it is something that they've been really insistent about. So we are going to be having more of those coming up. They're going to be about every 20 to 30 minutes. Sometimes I will remember to do the breaks and sometimes I will not. They will always have a Billy. I beg to differ. Billy, I beg to differ with you in front of them. I know that BPN has put a couple of ad breaks in past episodes that do not have Billy Ibeck to differ with yous in front of them. So just know that that was on Team bpn. That was Daddy BPN being like, you know, get those ads in there, make that money. And I know you guys want me to survive off of this podcast and not have to tap dance for my lunch on the street or do worse on the street corner, but yeah, so that's, that's one thing that's gonna be happening next. Order of business, next week's episode. I don't want to give too much away, but it's a bit of a two parter. The second part is an interview that I do with a multi Tony nominated writer who has a book coming out in October. It's very exciting. The book is very good. I think you'll really like the conversation that we have. He's a very smart, very funny. I'm a big fan of his work. I'm not going to tell you who it is, but they do have, I believe, six Tony nominations for writing both scripts and scores. They write lyrics and they write scripts and they have had a few shows on Broadway. They are a really accomplished individual and very impressive. So that's the second half of next week's episode. The first half is going to be a bit of a surprise. And actually I should probably say this now. The episode's gonna be coming out on Friday, next week, not Thursday, because there's a bit of housekeeping on my end I have to do that won't be happening until Wednesday night, Thursday morning. So I want to make sure that I have all of my ducks in a row. I have all the correct information before I record the first half of next week's episode. It is pertaining to, to my play. I have a major update about it for all of you guys now. I will just say right now it's not a full blown production, it's not going to Broadway, but we are moving forward with it in a really exciting way, in a kind of different way than I think any of us really expected, but exciting nonetheless. You know, in this industry, when opportunity comes, you take it until you can be the one doling out opportunities. You say yes to whatever comes your way. So that's what's happening. And we have a couple of things we have to finalize. A couple of dates have to be finalized and a couple of clickable links. Because with the announcement next week about what's going on with my play, I'm also going to let you guys in a little bit about what my play covers. Like, what it actually is. Some of you who follow me on Instagram know the title of it, have probably seen little pieces here and there. Some of you have learned about like the Spotify playlist that we made for it. I will actually divulge more of the plot and the characters and the origins of the play and, and all of that, as well as a little bit of help I'm gonna need from some of you guys. All of you if I, if I'm lucky. But I know a lot of people like to listen but don't actually want to participate, which is totally fine. That's your prerogative. But it does require a little bit of action next week. Hopefully nothing painful. I think it's all things you will be excited to be a part of and it's up to you how involved you want to be. But it would really mean a lot if you did get involved. I will say no more. Other than that, as I said, this is going to be next Friday's episode and I'm very excited to share with you guys the news about the play as well as just sort of the contents of the play itself. I had something else I wanted to mention, but I can't remember what. Anyway, we'll just keep moving on for now. The. Oh yes. Also the Discord Channel. So after next week's episode. So this is the Broadway Grosses episode. Next week is going to be my announcement and my interview with a six time Tony nominee. Very exciting. The week after that will be the launch of the new series Grab Bag. The series where all of y' all submitted shows and movie musicals and plays to Miss Sally bowl, which I then retrieved live on Instagram on my, you know, Instagram story. And we picked out our 14 pieces. We have a lot of amazing things. We have Angels in America, which was mostly most likely going to be a two parter because it's so epic. We have Come From Away, A Gentleman's Guide to love and murder, 9 passion, American Psycho, the Women, A Streetcar Named Desire, Fat Ham. We have the Wiz movie version. We have the 2021 west side Story remake. I feel like there's one more that I'm forgetting, but that might be covering it for now. Oh, Jekyll and Hyde. Yes. So I start recording these episodes a couple of days from now. I'm this episode I'm recording is literally Wednesday, September 18th. The first grab Bag episode is being recorded a week from Sunday and then a couple more after that. Oh, Little Shop of Horrors. That's another one that we're covering. So all the shows have guests attached now. We're in the scheduling phase. I'm in the exhausting phase of pulling my research of finding all information about the origins and the history and the legacies of these shows. But the fun part is actually watching these shows so my guests and I can have things to respond to, to react to. Now, if you haven't joined the Discord Channel yet, now would be a really good time for two reasons. One, I will be sharing on the Discord Channel the day before I record each episode. What shows will be covered the next day, and if anybody has questions or has comments they want to make about those shows that we can address when we record, that'll be on the Discord Channel. The other reason why you might want to join is if you haven't watched all of these shows and are unsure if finding out how to watch them. A phenomenal member of the Broadway Breakdown, Discord has compiled a mega site with folders abound for each episode of Grab Bag, and in each folder is content media content that you can watch to bone up on those episodes in preparation for them. So if you've never seen A Streetcar Named Desire before, if you join the Discord and you go to the Grab Bag media section of the Discord, you will find a post from one of our beloved members and you can click on it and you can find in the Streetcar folder a link to the National Theater broadcast production as well as the 1950s movie version with Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando. There's also on YouTube a television version with, I believe, Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange. If you've never watched Fat Ham, the mega site has a folder for Fat Ham with two different broadcasts of that play. There is one for Little Shop of Horrors of a bunch of different productions. It's really, really just very valuable. It's totally invaluable contribution that will help you guys out so much. It's gonna help me out a bunch. I've already shared it with all of the guests to be like, hey, if you can't figure out how to watch any of this, here you go. And everyone who's joining the podcast to talk about these shows, everyone's just so pumped and very grateful to have this content at their fingertips and I think you guys will be too. So again, now is the time to join the Discord. If you haven't yet, of course, I will remind you guys every week if you haven't done it, as well as reminding you to give ratings and reviews. But that is all of the housekeeping for now. More ads. I'm sorry, but here we are. We have one episode next week that's going to be coming out on Friday that is both an interview as well as a major announcement and divulgence introspection investigation of my play and the Grab Bag series right after that, as well as the Discord Channel. So that is all of the housekeeping for that. It's not necessarily 20 minutes, but I am gonna get our first commercial break out of the way now so we can get into the grosses, because I don't know how long this is gonna go for. Probably not that long. But even so, you guys know me. I'll always say, oh, it's only gonna be 10, 15 minutes. And then an hour later, I'm still fucking talking. Because that is how we do. So let us take our first break.
- [11:35]
A
Billy, I beg to differ with you.
- [11:37]
B
How do you mean?
- [11:37]
A
You're the top. Yeah, you're an arrow collar. You're the top. You're a Coolidge dollar. You're the nimble tread of the feet of.
- [11:53]
B
And we are back. So as we get into the Broadway grosses, let us cover a couple of bases. First of all, the part of reason why we are doing this is I have felt for a while now that Broadway fans, for the most part, don't really like to look into the business side of things. And I understand it's very complicated. Lord knows, I don't understand all of it myself. And I've been up in this business for a while now and have many friends who work on all different angles of Broadway shows, and yet somehow I can only really maintain, like, 45% of the information. So I do understand that. But it is hurtful to conversations among theater fans online, in person, when you don't understand how the business works. Because when shows open, when shows close, when shows are struggling, people don't want to see or understand that. They just want to get angry. So when a show closes, they go, oh, we can't have nice things. Oh, this is terrible. Oh, why can't they keep it open longer? Believe in art, things like that? Or, you know, oh, this show has a major movie studio behind it. So they're just. They have all the money in the world, so it's never going to close. History has proven so many of these mind frames to be simplistic and untrue. And I am not here to shame anyone for not knowing anything. I am here to shame people for not wanting to know anything. It's. I have the same mentality about this as I do about racism or bigotry. Which is ultimately that in my humble opinion, these kind of hateful thinkings happen because people don't want to think more nuanced than what they have. They cannot handle thinking about other people in a more expansive way. So they categorize people places in these very thin mental files because that's all they can handle. I find that simplistic and I find that idiotic. I feel the same way when people take a very simplistic approach to analyzing the success or the trajectory of Broadway shows. Quality is something we can always debate, right. And that comes from our own personal experiences of experiencing the shows. Or are the long list of shows you might have seen. I think someone who has seen 300 Broadway shows is gonna have a different experience to their 300th and first Broadway show than the person at that same production. And it's their first or third Broadway show. So I'm just a very big fan of Knowledge is power. I don't have all the knowledge, but I have some. And I would like to share it. And I hope that all of you who listen to this episode can take some of this with you in the future as you maybe start looking at the grosses now. I am a nerd. I've always really enjoyed grosses. I've enjoyed box office grosses for the movies. It's how my dad and I bonded when I was a kid. And I've enjoyed reading them in the theater world. I started getting a subscription, a weekly subscription to Variety from my dad when I was, I want to say, like 12 or 13. Yeah, that's about right. Because I remember looking at the grosses for Wicked every Monday because they used to get posted every Monday. Now they're posted every Tuesday. And these grosses are what's released by the Broadway League, which then gets published in Playbill and Broadway World and Variety and all those other places. As we look at these grosses, I'm going to be looking at the grosses from this past week, week, which is to say the week ending on September 15th. So that was the last week of the Broadway 2 for 1 deals. Or at least that is what Telecharge was telling me as I was looking through the seating charts of a lot of these different shows like Back to the Future and Great Gatsby. They were offering two for one deals for a lot of these shows up until September 15th. So with that in mind, I just want to you give give you a couple of thoughts before we look at some of these numbers and what they mean. First of all, what we're reading, these numbers are not. This is not the money that a Broadway show is taking in total. This is what's called the gross gross. This is not the net gross, or rather this is not the net adjusted gross box office receipt nagbor as it's affectionately known. This is how much money was taken in at the box office, but not what's taken in by the production. You have to take off some cash before you take that into consideration. You usually take off about 4.5% of the gross that you're reading and that goes to benefits for unions and pensions. There's another percentage that goes to credit card companies, another percentage that goes to ticket buying groups. Because often there's sort of a, there's like a percentage fee like with a broker. When you buy your apartment, your broker gets a percentage. People from, let's say like hotel concierges at hotels or entertainment organizations that buy bulks of tickets for large theater going groups, they get basically like a brokerage percentage. So a lot of those percentages go to those credit card companies and those group ticket sales. So you on average have somewhere between like 6 to 10% of the gross that you're looking at gets shaved off for all of those pensions and benefits and fees. So with that in mind, we are looking at the gross gross, we're not looking at the nagbor, the net adjusted gross for box office receipts this past week. Let's start from the top and work our way down. And we're going to try our best to not go super in depth with all of these things. But I figured we can sort of look at a couple of plays and a couple of musicals and discuss what this means because a lot of people will just look at a basic number and go, well, that's great, right? What might be a great number for one show is not necessarily great for another. It also depends on where you're at within the run of your show, what theater you're in, what time of year is it. So there's been no major holidays. This is not tourist season right now. We are in the middle of September. But we did just have a major ticket purchasing incentive with Broadway week, Broadway weeks, I suppose. And so even though maybe tickets are cheaper because they are cheaper, it's getting more butts and deceits. And as we get to the end of Broadway week, that tends to be where the most folks, when the most folks go, when the, when the time is running out, that is when people run out to go see it. It's, you know, when a show is closing. It's why, like the last two weeks of a run, when a show closes like is when it's at its most filled in a long time because people are rushing to see it before they can't see it anymore. So at the top of our list here we have and Juliet at the Stephen Sondheim Theater. And Juliet grossed $800,315 last week, which is an over $82,000 increase from the week before of an average ticket price of 108 with a top ticket price of 324. So 324, that is the highest ticket price on record that was sold last week for N. Juliet. Most likely a premium orchestra seat. For the average ticket price to be 108, that means there was a good deal of rush or lottery seats sold, discounted seats sold. Again, we have these two for ones. So you're going to see the average ticket price be lower at this point. The average ticket price is helpful to know because even if you fill every seat in your theater, if your average ticket price is like $45, you are not going to be covering your running costs. So even if you see 100% capacity that week, if the average ticket price is super low, it doesn't matter. Same with if you see that the theater Is filled to 75% capacity but the average ticket price is really high, you have a good chance that the show is actually covering most of its costs. And Juliet went up about 82, but it hasn't cracked more than 800k in a little while now. It's not a very large theater. The Stephen Sondheim, it's a little over a thousand seats. So they have to fill about 8,200 seats a week, which they haven't. They have not been at a completely sold out status in a while, but they have averaged a well above 80% capacity every week for the better part of this year. They haven't hit a million dollars in their gross since late June. And that was the first time that they had hit a million dollars since late April. Over 800,000, over 900,000 is not terrible for N. Juliet. It does have relatively high running cost as the years go on, as inflation increases, you know, as inflation increases the prices of everything and also as unions increase their contracts and whatnot. Running costs. Sorry, I'm talking in gibberish right now. I'm running on fumes. So I apologize. I swear I'm a lot smarter than I sound. But running costs increase as the years go on. It is inflation. It is also because the unions negotiate contracts that increase their wages. I talked to a couple of different producer friends of mine, and I was like, what is the number one contributing factor to a show's running cost if you were to take out labor wages? And they were saying, well, probably upkeep, because that's what fluctuates a show's running cost. But they were like, you cannot emphasize enough how much labor affects a show's running cost. And that's not just actors. That is, if you're a musical, people in the pit. That is people backstage working on automation, people in the lighting booth, people on the soundboard. That is stage management. That is people working on costumes. That's people doing upkeep on costumes and wigs and makeup. And if you have a show with children in it, that's also the child wranglers. You know, there are a lot of people working backstage in addition to onstage. One of the things that people always talk about when they say, like, oh, the show can't be expensive to run. It only has one set. Well, that's not really how these things work. You don't pay for each piece of scenery that you use. The scenery is part of your capitalization, right? You spend money to make all of these sets. Where scenery can be expensive for running, cost is upkeep. If you have a lot of set pieces, if it's very techno technology heavy or technologically heavy, you have to do a lot of upkeep to make sure that the stage is safe for your cast all the time. Something like the rising tire in Cats had to be tested before every show. It had to have maintenance all the time. Because you had two actors who were floating on that at the end of every show. And per union agreements, it had to be deemed safe all the time. And if it wasn't safe, then the show couldn't get go. Same thing with Elphaba, with Defying Gravity. Obviously, they have no fly shows, so they don't cancel the show if the cherry picker isn't working, but they have alternatives, and they test it. And sometimes things happen, and they do upkeep on that cherry picker to figure out what's going on with it. Because you don't want to have a month of no fly shows. You know, for something like N. Juliet, the set is mostly a turntable, but that turntable requires upkeep because so much of the staging is reliant on that turntable moving. The actor's safety is reliant on that turntable working as it's supposed to. There are a lot of costumes in and Juliet, which require a lot of upkeep. And every ensemble member has their own set of costumes. Every ensemble member that understudies a principal role has their own set of costumes when they go on for that principal. So anytime a costume gets torn or gets faded or whatnot, there has to be upkeep for that. There's always constant rehearsal for shows. Again, to make sure that everyone who's covering tracks is. Is on top of it. So if they have to go on, they go on. That is usually built into a running cost, but also sometimes you have extra rehearsals if there's a major switch around where a principal is sick, but then one of their understudies is sick, so they have to then do an emergency rehearsal to put on the second understudy. And then all of the swings are on, but that's still not enough coverage. So swings have to start doing what's called split tracks, where they're covering three different ensemble members tracks. But they have to find a way to, you know, do it in a way that doesn't leave the show hanging. So, you know, stage pictures get altered for these kind of things. This requires a lot of time, and time is money in any business, but especially in the business of show, for something like N Juliet, you have all of that in addition to royalties. That's not just Max Martin, whose catalog the show uses, but also any artist that he recorded those songs with most likely get some sort of percentage. That's a deal that I'm sure was worked out way ahead of time, but also royalties for the book writer, for the director, for the choreographer. Now, royalties can fluctuate. Every contract is different, right? You have some artists who would just want a flat fee every week, no matter how much money the show took in. That is what. That is what they're going to do. And then other artists have negotiated a much lower weekly fee with the caveat that they get a certain percentage of the profits from that week. I don't have this in writing, but I am made to understand that Casey Nicholaw made a certain deal like that with Book of Mormon, that his royalty fee as director choreographer would be lower per week, but he would in exchange get a specific percentage of whatever the profits were that week, which ended up working out very well for him, because as we all know, Book of Mormon extraordinarily profitable for many, many, many years. And also royalties tend to increase as time goes on. This is one of the things that made Phantom of the Opera so expensive to run. No show ever ran 35 years before. So Hal Prince, Maria Bjornsson, Gillian Lynn, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Charles Hart, Richard Silgo, they all had royalty fees that were pretty much astronomical. By that point. They already had very good deals for the Broadway run with sort of the understanding that this show is probably going to run for about eight to 10 years, because at that point the only thing that had run longer was a course line which was slowly on its way out. And while Cats was still doing well with Taurus, Les Mis and Phantom very much stole its thunder. So it was no longer this like super, super hot ticket. So it could close a year or two from then or 10 years from them, as it eventually did so with Phantom because of the contracts that everyone had and because no one expected it to run as long as it did. By the time it closed, everyone on the production team had royalties that were just bananas. And ultimately certain long running shows like Lion King and Chicago, those royalties will catch up with them. Lion King I don't think is really in any particular danger. It continues to make a good chunk of money every week and has never really faltered. Something like Chicago, I think that will eventually catch up with them, the production team, the artistic team. So you know Bob Fosse, John Kander, Fred Ebb, as well as Gwen Verdon's estate, because she had a piece of the original production. And the whole point of her making Chicago happen was that way her daughter Nicole could have something to live off of when she passed. But all of those royalty fees will eventually cash out with Chicago, if they haven't already. Bringing us back to and Juliet, remember when I said we're going to try to keep these things short and simple? Yeah. That was a fucking pipe dream. As we look at and Juliet, it is mid September with an $800,000 gross, as we mentioned. You know, we would probably shave off about $80,000 of that and say that the production took in 720. That's probably a little under what their nut is right now. They. I know they've got a lot of coverage going on. A lot of people in and out with sickness, with injuries, with. With vacations. So this is probably not where they want to be, but they're not in total danger yet. And I say this because all you have to do is look back at the last couple of weeks to see the trends that they are that they've been on. This is a little bit on the lower side for sure. It's up from last week, but last week was their lowest gross in months. They for the year of 2024. And Juliet, as I'm looking at these grosses, made over, grossed over a million dollars for a good handful of weeks at the beginning of the year, slowly but surely trickling under a million in the 900,000 range, then the high 800,000 range, then they were back up to a million. When spring break happened, they were back up to 1.3 million. And then as kids went back to school, as holidays started to dissipate, as other new shows started to open, shows like the Outsiders, shows like Suffs and Stereophonic, that does take away interested audiences. People want to see what's hot. They want to see what's been established as the good thing. And even if you were established as that when you opened, that doesn't mean you're going to be able to cultivate that fervor for a very long time. Some exceptions like Hamilton and Book of Mormon, but even Book of Mormon, and we'll get to that in a second, you know, hasn't been able to maintain that luster forever. As we look through April, as we look through May, we see that N. Juliet's grosses have been steadily going down. They did hit a million dollars again at the end of April, but as we got to May, they were in the low eight hundreds, Then they were back up to the mid nine hundreds, then the low nine hundreds, then the high eight hundreds, then the mid seven hundreds, eight hundreds, eight hundreds, a million nine hundred, eight hundred, eight hundred, nine hundred, nine hundred. And such is the trajectory of that. Again, they have been able to fill the theater relatively well. They go from anywhere from 83% capacity to or 80% capacity to 95% capacity. Last week they were at just under 90% capacity on average. That does not mean that every performance was 90%. That means they could have had a sold out Saturday night show, which means that the Wednesday matinee was. Was at 80%, which is not, you know, a terrible number to have. But that gives you insight into where and Juliet is coming from and where it's heading. Because if you look at the numbers of when and Juliet opened, we were looking at a pretty consistent sold out to almost sold out run. You know, we look at November of 2022 and we see plenty of. We see plenty. Sorry, I'm looking at these numbers now. We see plenty of million dollar and 900 high $900,000 weeks. We see them constantly over 95% capacity, sometimes 100% capacity, all leading up to the Tony Awards again as we go into 2023, over a million 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, which is all very good. That's not, you know, fuck you, Disney money. But that is very strong. We are not in danger of closing anytime soon. Again, they are in a thousand seat theater, so there's only so much money they can gross with that many seats to fill. And it doesn't have necessarily brand recognition and has songs that people know. But this is not an international phenomenon. This is not a title that everyone knows. There are no major stars in it. So it did extraordinarily well for its first year and now we're in its second year and it's still doing fine. It's not doing incredible, but it's not in danger of closing at the end of the year, I wouldn't say. Next up we have Aladdin. Not much to say here. Aladdin is at the New Amsterdam Theater and it truly doesn't matter what it grosses because the New Amsterdam Theater is owned by Disney Theatrical. And that's very important because after labor, the next major financial component to a show's running cost is what it pays the theater in rent and overhead. And when you own your theater, you don't have to kick yourself out of your theater. We saw this happen when Mary Poppins was in the New Amsterdam. Mary Poppins moved in, which brought the Lion King into the Minskoff Theater, which is owned by the Nederlanders, which is totally fine because Disney has a long running partnership with the Nederlander organization. I believe the only show of theirs to not open at a Nederlander theater outside of the New Amsterdam was Frozen, which opened at the St. James, which used to be owned by Drew Jamison. And I guess now that's Ambassador Theatre Group, the artist formerly known as Drew Jamson. But otherwise Disney has, to my knowledge, always gone with Nederlander. Beauty and the Beast was at the palace, then moved to the L'. Enfantan. Little mermaid went to the L'. Enfandan. Tarzan was at Richard Rogers. Newsies was at the Nederlander. That's just sort of what they tend to do. So with Aladdin at the New. The New Amsterdam, until they have a show to replace Aladdin with, they're not in any danger. And also, Aladdin has pretty consistently grossed over a million dollars every week now. Its running cost could very well be close to a million or 1.1. That is not really a problem. They have pretty much grossed over 1.1, if not over 1.2, 1.3 for a while now. For this past year. They definitely do Better during holidays when school is out, because a lot of families like to go. But it is a large theater, which means they don't need a very high ticket average in order to not only fill it, but to gross a certain number. So, for example, and Juliet, it may only be 8,200 seats to fill every week. And they had a higher ticket average than Aladdin. They both had a higher top ticket price and a ticket average. And Juliet's top ticket price was 324. Its average ticket was 108 and change. Aladdin's top ticket was 189 and change with an average of $84 and change. But they have over 5,000 dol more seats to fill, and they filled most of those seats, so they were able to gross over $300,000 more than and Juliet. This is not saying that it's doing better. It just means that Aladdin is pretty much set. Disney has done a very good job of figuring out how to do dynamic pricing for their shows during, you know, any part of the year for any part of the theater. Next up is Back to the Future. Now, I don't mean to say this because I have it out for this show. Everyone who listens to this podcast, anyone who follows me on Instagram, knows I don't care for this show. I don't think it's terribly good. I don't think it's terrible. It's objectively not a steaming pile of garbage, if only because it is so faithful to the movie and the movie script is pretty fantastic. But I just found this show very lazy and I found it to be a major cash grab. Back to The Future grossed $768,000 and change, which is up about $54,000 and change from the previous week. That's not great. Now, the reason why I say this, and it's only $30,000 less than n Juliet, Back to the Future, from all reports, has a higher running cost than N. Juliet. It's also younger on Broadway than N Juliet and has more seats in its theater. Back to the features at the Winter Garden Theater, they have nearly 12,000 seats to fill. We're talking 3,600 more seats than and Juliet. And it has been on and Juliet has been on Broadway for 11 months longer than Back to the Future. So it's not as new, it's not as shiny. It also doesn't have the brand recognition of Back to the Future, which is a billion dollar trilogy that many, many people know and love. And Back to the Future came out the gate swinging when it opened back in July, August of 2023, you know, I don't know how many of you remember, but when it first opened in 2023, it opened to, you know, $1.3 million and was consistently grossing over a million dollars for the entire summer that it opened, it slowly but surely got closer to the million dollar mark. So it was like, you know, 1.3, 1.2. And then as you look through September and October, it gets closer and closer to the edge of going under $1 million. But it is still able to say above that for the rest of 2023 with a all time high of grossing $2.1 million. The Christmas slash New Year's Eve week of 2023, the week ending December 31st, where they are able to sell out not only the entire theater, but do standing room. After that, grosses start immediately. Going down. Still healthy, 1.3, 1.2. But it does hit its first week in January of 2024 of going under a million dollars. Now, January is hard for everyone, but again, for a show that at this point was five months old, with huge brand name recognition and is in a 1500 seat theater, there should be no room for under a million dollars at all. This should be a surefire over a million dollars every week, no matter what. And Back to the Future has from all reports a million dollar running cost which can fluctuate based on maintenance, based on how much they're advertising every week. Usually you set yourself a budget for advertising and if you spend less one week, whatever is left over tends to go into the following week. So you spend $150,000 on like a major campaign for commercials on this TV show and then the next week you pay half of that for YouTube ads. Back to the future. I'm mostly seeing YouTube ads. I'm not seeing a lot of TV ads, but I also don't watch a lot of TV when it's live. As you continue into 2023, we get into February where we're in the 900k area again, 800k area back up to a million, back down to 800 to 900. And then for the rest of the March and April, we are pretty safely in the million dollar club. We get into May, post Tony nominations and it has, from what I can tell, its lowest gross, sorry, its second lowest gross to date, which is $845,000. It goes up a little bit, but still doesn't crack 900. It has a couple of weeks going over a million. It spends the first part of the summer of June doing 1.1, almost 1.2. And then for July, you can watch as the numbers slowly but surely get down to the million dollar break. And then we get to August 18th. Some schools are back in session, but not all schools. It is still summer to a lot of people. And Back to the Future around the year mark with a $95 ticket average, grosses $906,000. Then the following week it goes down again. It pops back up for labor day weekend of $979,000, which is not a terrible gross for something like say Cephs or Illinois or Stereophonic, but for again, Back to the Future, which is 11,800 seats every week, it's got a fill that is not what you want. Not when you're at the year mark, not when it's a holiday weekend when you are gouging tourists for as much as they're worth. Because then it drops again to $713,000, its lowest gross to date. It's not even at the 18 month mark of its run, not even at the 15 or 14 month mark. So even though it's gone up a little bit since last week, not enough. And we're going to see it go down again for the rest of September, I guarantee you. I think we are on our way to seeing it. Back to the Future closing notice for December or January. What people will tell you is it grossed $2 million not that long ago. It grossed $2 million nine months ago on a not only a holiday week, but the most profitable holiday week year round for Broadway. Christmas and New Year's is always the biggest money grab for all Broadway shows. That is usually when they post their highest grosses of the year. So that 2.1 is not the norm. That was the anomaly. And if Back to the Future were grossing 1.1 right now, I wouldn't say that they're in danger. I would say that, you know, a year or two from now we would see the closing. But $700,000 and change at this point in the run, that's no good. That is. And again, that's just what we're seeing as the gross. The show itself is probably taking in 630, $640,000 this past week. No good, no good. Moving on. Cabaret at the KKI Club. This grossed $1.6 million and change. This was the last week of Gayle Rankin and Eddie Redmayne. So of course grosses would go up over $100,000 with a average ticket price of 196, which is incredibly high. And Then you realize that the highest ticket price was 699. So there were definitely people getting deals for this one. And they were able to sell out almost the entire theater. Not exactly every seat. They. It says 99.44%. So for eight shows of 8560 seats, they were able to fill 8512, which is great. That's. That's a number anyone would be happy with. It's a little surprising that they couldn't completely sell out Eddie and Gail's last week of the show. And I mean, listen, we're talking like 48 seats, which isn't a lot. That's an average of six seats a show. But still, for something like this that has been promoted as such an event. And Eddie is a major star and they. You know, we're really sort of promoting Gale as the next big thing. And she has a fan base with Glow and with the. I think she's on the. I think she's on House of Dragon. Yeah, she's on one of those shows you would expect, like, again, final week. Go see them now. You would expect a total sellout. So it was close to that, but not quite. Chicago at $777,000 and change doing quite well. I don't know who's in it right now. I know Orfeh is currently playing Morton for at least another day or two. I think Robin Herder just left as Velma. I don't know if Ariana Maddox is still in it as Roxy. I don't think so. But no, Chicago has had its bumps. They have had some star casting that has done extremely well for them. Others that have done merely okay. Nothing has matched Jinx Monsoon going in for Mama Morton for her time. But they have done, I will say, the last two years, they've done some smart casting to keep grosses up. Because for that show, I would probably say Chicago costs somewhere in the mid to high. 600 thousands to run. Again, royalties are perhaps the most expensive thing on that show at this point. I don't think anyone in it making hand over fist. The Weisslers have been very strategic about how they keep that show running and keep the financials as low as possible to keep it profitable. Next up we have Hadestown, which grossed around the same number as Chicago, but it also has about 1300 fewer seats. So, of course their average ticket price is higher. They're filling up more of the theater. Hadestown is another show that is still doing very well. It's not doing incredible, but they are still having profitable weeks People have been talking for a very long time about the death of Hadestown, of when's it going to close. Clearly they can't sustain these numbers. Apparently they can. Apparently these are numbers that they can do solid business with. They can keep the lights on with these numbers. If we start seeing Hadestown dipping into the 600,000s and lower, or just sort of staying in the 600 thousands, like if they can't crack 700k consistently, I think that's when we start sounding the alarm. But for now, I don't think we have anything to worry about. Hamilton. Nothing to worry about. 1.6 mil. It's down from the previous week, but they are still filling that theater pretty consistently. They're no longer at total sellout status. They are not able to charge the numbers they used to for tickets. They do not have the highest ticket price on Broadway. They do not have the highest ticket average on Broadway. That would go to Cabaret. That would also McNeil, which we'll get to in a hot second, has a much higher ticket average than Hamilton. And something else does as well. I think the Outsiders has a slightly higher ticket average than Hamilton. But again, Hamilton's been around since 2015 and survived Covid and has the Disney plus broadcast that everyone can watch. So to consistently be doing 1.6, this theater is great. Again, it is an institution right now, but it has been around for almost 10 years. It has about 1300 fewer seats to fill than Back to the Future, and yet it doubled Back to the future's grosses. So again, that's a way to compare the two. And people have been trying to say, oh, well, Back to the Future has Universal behind it. They'll pour money into it. They a. That's not how it works. A Universal is not the lead producer of Back to the Future. Most likely they are a co producer because Back to the Future is a Universal property. But also, it doesn't matter how much money you have. Nobody likes to lose money, especially if it doesn't seem like it's going to pay off. I know there was the Broadway Journal report about that. They had, I think, $6 million in reserve for money losing weeks. That's not money that they want to tap into. That's not money that they're going to always go into and say, it's fine, it's fine, we'll keep going. We've got this to cover our ass until we start making money again. When you are. When you. When you are below a million dollars for two months and two weeks out of Those two months is your lowest gross or two lowest grosses to date. And you've been open barely a year. Things are not looking good. It's not going to look any better come January or February. They are not going to dip into that 6 mil just for the hope that they can get back to 1.3, $1.4 million next spring. You know, if they're smart, they will close up shop at the end of the year and they will have November and December to make as much money and pay off as much of their capitalization as possible. And then have the national tour do as well as it will and pay off the rest. That's what actually happened with the company revival with its tour, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Two straight weeks below a million dollars. Honestly, that's not great. This week they did go up almost $40,000, but they were not able to crack a million. Again, not amazing. This is a theater that while they have reduced the seating capacity at the Lyric, it is still a sizable theater. 12,600 seats per week. That is 2100 more seats than Hamilton. And again, Hamilton grossed $700,000 more than Harry Potter. And Harry Potter is an expensive show to run. There are a lot of people in that cast. The high tech elements of that show mean there are a lot of people backstage. The there are sure royalties up the wazoo with everyone on that production team. I would be surprised if it costs less than a million dollars a week to run Harry Potter, which wouldn't be a problem. They have been able to gross over a million dollars constantly. But these last two weeks are not wonderful weeks for them. I don't think they're in trouble yet. We have to sort of see how the rest of the fall turns out. But, you know, I don't think that we're looking at a Phantom style long run. I don't think we're looking at a Beauty and the Beast long run. I think that Harry Potter, which is currently at like 1500 performances, I think that they might tap out at the 2500 performance marker, if not lower than that. We will continue with the rest of the H's in just a moment, but first, let's take another break.
- [49:09]
A
How do you mean you're the top? Yeah. You're an arrow collar. You're the top. You're a Coolidge dollar. You're the nimble tread of the feet of red.
- [49:23]
B
And we are back. So we are now at the H's of these grosses. We have seen Hell's Kitchen, which just went up 135k to gross $1.5 million. After a 1.3 million dollar gross which is all perfectly fine, Hell's Kitchen isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Their highest ticket price was 3, 123, average of 131. They have figured out how to appeal to their audience, how to, how to price their tickets for their audience. They have been pretty consistently filling up that theater to if not 100%, like 98% capacity. But they've, they've had many sold out weeks in the shooter theater. Despite not winning best Musical in my opinion, despite not having a very good Tony performance and also not being a very good show. Word of mouth on this show seems to be strong. I think that this is probably going to be more of a spamalot circa 2005 situation where it's popular, it's hot, if not necessarily red hot for like a year and a half and slowly start to taper off from there and ends up running 1200 performances, 1600 performances, something along those lines, which is a very impressive and very respectable length run, especially for a show that I don't like very much, but good on them. It's hard to catch on with Broadway audiences and if you are able to do it, I am not going to spit in your oat milk. Next up is Job at the Hayes Theater which I think had its highest grossing week last week with $328,000. Let me just confirm, confirm that, yeah, that is the highest grossing week for Job to date. For the most part they have been sort of holding water in the mid to high 200 thousands at the Hays, which is again, it is, it is the smallest theater on Broadway. You know, they fill something like, yeah, 4,600 seats a week, which is, what is that? 580 seats in the theater? Something like that. And they aren't filling it up completely. Last week they averaged 79.9% capacity. Which means that God forbid, if there was a sold out show, that means there was another show that was like 58% full. I don't think we're looking at that. But even though Job is only two actors on stage, two actors understudying them, and probably not a very large crew backstage, I can't imagine that it costs less than $300,000 a week to run. I would imagine that's probably around what it costs. And they haven't had many weeks that have gone over $300,000. So that's not wonderful. We're not talking about them losing hundreds of thousands a week. Maybe not even more than a couple of thousand a week. Like I don't see this show bleeding money, but it's not exactly profitable. And I know it took a lot of us by surprise when they announced an extension for Job at the Haze when it didn't necessarily get incredible reviews and it wasn't exactly selling out the Hayes Theater, the smallest on Broadway. And Job always had to leave the Haze at some point because Second Stage will be coming in to take over with their season. I think the first, first show they've got coming up is Cult of Love and then after that is Persuasion. So those shows are on their way. And so Job is ending at the end of October no matter what. But I believe it was scheduled to close at the end of September. And then they announced a four week extension again. Took many of us by surprise. But you know, you look at their highest ticket price of 241 and their average is $88. So there is probably some complimentary seats going out. A lot of discount, a lot of rush or lottery, lot of TDF seats. If you are a member of td, see Job on there pretty consistently. I mean, you'll see Back to the Future up there consistently in Water for Elephants. There are some shows you just see consistently on tdf and that doesn't necessarily mean that the show is in trouble, but it does indicate that they're having difficulties moving certain seats. And listen, I'm a big fan of making theater affordable. I'm a big fan of if you can't sell the seat at face value, why not sell it at a discount? Why not put it up on tdf? This was something that was bugging me for a very long time about Some Like It Hot. Some Like It Hot. From the intel I had from friends who worked on that show and worked in the theater while that show was running there. They had such difficulty filling the schubertheater so many nights where the balcony was completely empty and they moved everyone down to the mezzanine and even then the mezzanine, half full, orchestra, half full. I had friends who would work in that theater and text me afterwards and say like 650 seats tonight filled. Which is devastating for that company to go out and look at so much empty blue seatage. But they also wouldn't put it on TDF a lot. And when they would, they would say, oh, it's just balcony seating. So people in the know would buy a TDF ticket for the balcony knowing they would be moved down to the mezzanine immediately. And that just Sort of annoyed me. So for something like Job to put themselves on tdf, I'm like, yeah, no, like have people buy those tickets and come see the show. Yes, it lowers your average ticket price. But without going on TDF, that, that average capacity of 79% would probably be closer to 60, 65%. And it's not great for morale. It's not great for Buzz to have half empty houses. So even though I don't think JOB is necessarily doing as well as they were hoping, I don't think that this is a disaster of a gross, a disaster of a run. I think everyone involved should be able to hold their head up high when it finally closes up shop at the end of October. Next up is McNeil at the Vivian Beaumont Theater. It is still in previews. This is their second week of pre five performances in a theater that seats about 10, 90 people, which is, you know, that's a sizable number of seats. If you've been to the Beaumont, you know that that theater can feel very intimate if you have a big epic show. And it can feel extremely cavernous if you're doing an intimate show. So like My Fair lady feels intimate, but Uncle Vanya feels enormous. From what I understand, McNeil has a lot of tech heavy elements to it, so that probably helps make the theater feel more intimate. Also, when the theater is completely full, it feels more intimate. And we have Robert Downey Jr. Making his Broadway debut right after winning the Oscar for Oppenheimer. So not only is Robert Downey Jr. A major movie star thanks to Iron man and has been around since the late 80s, so he's a known commodity. But winning an Oscar for one of the biggest movies of last year, like, he is so red hot. He doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want. And doing Broadway is clearly a passion project of his and he wants to do this play. And people are willing to shell out major, major amounts of money to do five shows with a thousand ninety seat theater. McNeil grossed $954,000. That is more than and Juliet with their eight shows with a, you know, much larger seating capacity. That is more than Back to the future with eight shows with again 1500 seat capacity. They grossed more than Chicago. They grossed more than Hadestown. They grossed more than Harry Potter. McNeil grossed almost $20,000 more than Harry Potter, which doesn't sound like a lot, but remember, we're talking three fewer performances. So imagine what they would be grossing if they were doing eight shows a week. And also, I cannot stress this enough, Harry Potter has way more seats. So, you know, with 500. With 5,475 seats to fill last week, and Harry Potter having 12,600 seats to fill. McNeil outgrows Harry Potter. That is incredible. Go off Robert Downey Jr. And not all of these seats are subscribers. I know this is at Lincoln Center Theater, which is a subscriber house. It's a nonprofit. This is. These are tickets that people are paying because half of the seats go to subscribers for, you know, a specific price, and then half the seats go to an outside market. And those are people who are paying far more than subscribers are. Which just goes to show, like, how. How insane it is that it's grossing what it's grossing. Good for them. MJ at the Neil Simon Theater only went up $200 last week, but it went up from $1.37 million to $1.37 million. MJ is in no trouble. They some. If you look at their grosses, if you look at the past year and they're about to approach the two year mark, I think on Broadway, they have pretty much been over a million dollars, like, healthily over a million dollars this entire calendar year. I don't think they've ever gone below that. Yeah, I'm trying. I'm looking right now if we. Have they gone below a million dollars at all? Have they come below a million dollars at all since they've opened? I don't think that they have. I think MJ has always done really, really incredible business. Now they are not selling out Slash doing standing room like they were right after they opened Slash, right after the Tony Awards where they had a really good haul and did, really, did a really good performance. But they. They are still doing very, very well. Okay, sorry. They. They were grossing under a million dollars a week when they were in previews and right after they opened. But, like, that's nothing. They were. They were doing just fine. This was December of 2021 into January of 2022. So not only did they start previews during the dead of winter, we were just coming back from COVID So people were trepidatious about coming back to the theater. There were mask mandates. Not everybody wanted to do that. No one knew anything about whether the show was going to be good. They just knew it was about Michael Jackson and his catalog. And, you know, word of mouth early on was that it was a fun time, but the reviews were not stellar. They were like, this is a lot of really great presentation for what's ultimately not a great show. But that didn't really matter in the end. And by mid February it was consistently grossing over a million dollars. 1.2, 1.3, 1.4. And I don't think we're gonna see it hitting the 1.8 or 2 million dollar mark until probably, you know, the Christmas, New Year's, Thanksgiving time. But we're seeing it at 1.2, 1.3 and or approaching the two year mark again. MJ, I think we're in the clear for a while. Next up is Moulin Rouge, also 1.3, which is very good. It's been around for five years at this point. Their grosses have done very well ever since Jojo and Aaron Tveit came back to the production. Moulin Rouge tends to fluctuate. They have dipped below a million dollars every week for a couple of times. They have gone way above a million dollars. Depends on who's in the show. Moulin Rouge does cost between 900k and a million dollars every week to run. Again, it depends on who's in it. It depends on how much recasting they're doing because that is a show that has had quite a lot of turnaround in the ensemble. They've had a. They've somehow were able to finagle a very good deal with the creatives of this show as well as the licensing of all of the songs that they use. I'm not entirely sure how they were able to swing it, but they were. That is not ultimately like the biggest financial burden on this show. They are doing very well. I don't think that Moulin Rouge is going to be Lion King level of long runs, but I see this doing like Hairspray, like less than, probably long running, longer than Hairspray, less than Mamma Mia. That is where I see Moulin Rouge heading towards because they are still doing very nicely. They are not doing fuck you money nicely, but they are consistently profitable. They are frequently profitable. They've had a couple of inconsistent weeks where they were not, but they are frequently profitable. They've got nothing to worry about. You want to know who also has got nothing to worry about? Oh, Mary at the Lyceum, which has been breaking box office records for weeks on end. They went down a little bit about $30,000 this past week, still grossing over a million dollars, still fully sold out. This is also a show that has had future sold out performances. If you go on tele charge, you will see certain nights, certain performances are grayed out because they are sold out. That is huge because I don't know how many of you realize this? But ticket buying practices have changed post Covid Broadway shows having huge advances is kind of a thing of the past. It might come back eventually. We're seeing some shows like McNeil, like Romeo and Juliet, having healthy advances, but they are not sold out for weeks on end like it used to be. When a show was a major hit, you couldn't get a ticket for months. You couldn't get a ticket for Hamilton for its first year. You had to pay $10,000 on StubHub or the Black market to get seats for that. Oh, Mary has sold out performances in the future, which is incredible. It's. First of all, this is a play. This is a four person play at honestly one of the most undesirable theaters on Broadway, transferring directly from off Broadway. It's a bonkers show. It seems so niche. It doing this well really warms my heart and it very much deserves that kind of success. So I want to give props to everyone involved with Omari on that. They should be very humbled and very excited about how well it's doing and will continue to do. And I'm interested to see what happens with this show's grosses come like October, let's say. But if they're doing over a million dollars every week since opening and if they're doing over a million dollars in September, that is they. I think that they are doing just fine. They are doing just fine. And it's still set to close in November. But between you and me, I think that they are very close to announcing another extension. So we'll see what happens there. But that is with, you know, 7,100 seats to fill. They filled all of them with an average ticket price of $150, one of the highest around right now. They are doing very nicely. Next up is Once Upon a Mattress, which did go up from its previous week of $44,000. They grossed $768,000, very close to $769,000, which is a very respectable gross. Again, you have to remember the show itself is probably taking in about 690,000 after everything else. And they are filling the theater. So they are definitely doing tdf. They're doing discounts. They're doing all these things. They're really marketing the show and trying to price it in a way that will get people to want to come see it. So at 92% capacity, that's nothing to sneeze at. It is the Hudson theater. They have 7,700 seats to fill every week and to Give you perspective. Merrily We Roll along was the previous Tenant, engrossing about double this amount on an average basis. But Merrily, as we all know, was an anomaly. It was critically beloved. It had stars in it that people wanted to see. It was a title that theater fans were really into. It was a big hot ticket Off Broadway. So they. They were able to transfer that buzz to Broadway. So merely, they just were. Were very lucky with how consistent they were able to sell that show. So we cannot necessarily judge Once Upon a Mattress based off of Merrily We Roll Alongs grosses. But it gives you an indication that just because it's 7700 seats per week doesn't mean Once Upon a Mattress isn't capable of hitting a million dollars with its grosses. I don't think it ever will. If this is what it's doing this early into the run, I don't think we're going to see it really get any. I think its highest grossing week will probably be in the 900 thousands at some point, maybe around the holidays, like around Thanksgiving. I think it's due to close in November before it goes off to la. But yeah, I don't think we're seeing it going much higher than this for the remainder of its run, which isn't terrible. I know that Encore's has budgeted this show to be as cost effective as possible, but they were definitely hoping for this to be another parade, another into the woods of sold out, make its money back, make money for encores. And that's really not going to happen. Once Upon a Mattress is not going to make its capitalization back and it's not going to make any money for Encores with this transfer. So even though they got very positive reviews, for the most part, they are filling the theater. Ultimately, this is not going to be considered one of their major successes. We'll see what how it does the Tonys when those nominations arrive in April. But even if it gets nominated for some, it's not winning any. It'll be long gone by that point. So no one's really going to care. All right, we're going to finish up with six Stereophonic Stuffs. Book of Mormon, Gatsby, Hills of California, Lion King, Notebook, Outsider's Roommate, Water for Elephants, Wicked and Yellowface in just a second. But let us take one final break.
- [66:57]
A
Billy, I beg to differ with you.
- [66:59]
B
How do you mean?
- [66:59]
A
You're the top. Yeah, you're an arrow collar. You're the top. You're a Coolidge dollar. You're the nimble Tread of the feet of Freddie.
- [67:15]
B
And we are back. So our final run of grosses before we continue. What have we Learned so far? 1, production costs are not based off of set pieces. Labor is perhaps the biggest factor in terms of production costs. After that would be royalties. After that would be marketing, which again is usually baked into the weekly earning cost. So that doesn't necessarily fluctuate week to week. But how much you're spending can get shifted week to week. You can spend more one week and then take, you know, spend less the following week. Things like put ins, things like rehearsals, that is all baked into costs. That is stuff that you kind of set aside. Certain things happen. Upkeep is a major factor. Unions are a major factor in why the labor costs are so high. Theater. Renting out the theater and the overhead from theater is another major cost. So when you see that there are a lot of people on stage, that there are a lot of people in the pit, there are probably going to be a lot of people backstage as well. Thus it is probably a high running show. Things that are super tech heavy, like Back to the Future, it makes sense. It's a large cast, it's a sizable orchestra. But how tech heavy that show is on stage means there's a lot of people backstage. And again, royalties and artistic fees means that that show is expensive. Wicked, very expensive. I think Wicked now costs well over a million dollars to run every week. But we'll get to Wicked in just a second. But like if you have a play that's got four actors who are not names, but a major piece of scenery that's really elaborate but it doesn't move, don't let anyone trick you into thinking that's an expensive show because they've got this really elaborate piece of scenery. If there's no automation, then you don't need a lot of stagehands backstage to move anything. If it's four actors and they all have one costume, not a lot of upkeep with costumes. So it's these all come together and nothing costs that little anymore. You're not going to see most shows costing less than 300k, if that anymore. And if it is that, it's something like Job, which is just very small in scope. But yeah, you're not. If you see anyone try to claim that any musical is costing less than $400,000 a week to run, tell them to suck on a lemon. So next up, we have six. Oh, other things we should probably remember. Sorry, I'm all over the place. Other things we should remember. When you're looking at tickets on grosses, you have the average ticket and the top ticket price. The top ticket price doesn't really matter so much as the average ticket price, because if someone is paying $399, that is is the top ticket price for that show. But if the average ticket price is 84, that means way more people were paying at a high discount or there were a lot of comps in the house that night. And comps can be for press, it can be for people involved with the production. It can be Tony voters, Tony nominators. These things all add up. And, you know, Russian lottery seats also affect a show's average ticket price. So even if a show is like a major, major hit, so even. So even you will see, you will see that the average ticket price will never be as close to the top ticket price because you will have Rush, you will have Lottery, you will have comps, you will have Tony voters, things like that. So you'll never see a Broadway show be like, our top ticket price was 350 and the average ticket price was 325. It's just not possible, not when you're offering Lottery and Rush, which most shows do. That being said, we have Six at the Lena Horne Theater, which did go up a little bit. They had a $37,000 increase. Yeah. And filled about 90% of the theater, grossing $764,000, which is great. Six is not a show with a super high overhead. It is not grossing what it once was. Let's be honest about that. And even though this is the dead of September, this was a discounted week, so there was hope that maybe they could fill it up a little bit more. But it is 8,200 seats to fill, which is more than, you know, once upon a mattress. But Six has now been around for three years, so it's no longer the hot new kid on the block. They were grossing around 800, 900k on an average basis. 7 over 700k is still really good for them. They are definitely still making money. They used to be grossing a million dollars, well over a million. And that hasn't really happened much. It's happened once or twice this year, but they have not grossed over a million dollars on a consistent basis. I would say, since. Let's look at this. If we're looking at trends since April of 2023, so it's like a year and a half into the run. That's very respectable for a show like Six, which, again, is not a huge theater. It's Not a huge Spectacle. It's a 70 minute show that definitely is a turn off for some people considering how expensive tickets are. They're like, I don't want a 70 minute show. I want to feel like every dollar I spent is being shown to me. So even though they are filling the theater pretty well and you can still make money on a show like 6 with, with over 700k gross and again they're probably taking in 690, they are no longer able to command the prices they once did. So six, as we look at these trends with it, they're not on their way out yet. But I don't think that we should be sitting comfortably feeling that six will be around three or four years from now. At least in my projections from this. Stereophonic, the best play winner of this year, went up a little bit in its grosses with $819,000. With a nearly sold out week. They had 6,224 seats to fill. They filled 6,202 of them. Their average ticket price was $132 and change with a high ticket price of 348. That is still one of the higher ticket averages of Broadway right now. They're are still filling that theater extraordinarily well. They are not grossing what they were grossing at the height post Tony Awards. I think they had one week, yeah, they had one week where they were able to break a million dollars and that was like right after the Tony Awards. Other than that, for the rest of the summer they were consistently grossing over 900k, bumping to a million like right underneath it, but not totally. Then they were slowly going down to the 800 thousands where they are sitting comfortably in the low to mid 800 thousands, which is great. I don't want anyone to be bummed out with Stereophonic with, you know, oh well, they were grossing, they grossed a million dollars that one time. Shouldn't this be doing that all the time always? No. Something like Omar is very much the anomaly. It's the exception to the rule. It's also newer than Stereophonic and it's a bit more. Despite how niche it is, it is an easier sell than Stereophonic. Stereophonic has the prestige factor. It has five Tony Awards, but it also is over three hours long. Not everyone's going to be willing to sit through that. Omar by Contrast is about 70 to 80 minutes. And whereas with six, for some reason, I don't know, I don't understand this, with six, people have been upset that it's as short as it is For a musical. O Mary is a play and about as long as six, if like maybe a couple minutes longer. And no one seems to mind. So I don't understand that. I don't understand how that is a marketing device for Omari and not for six. And that's not a producing thing. That's me understanding audiences going like, why does this one matter? And this one doesn't. But I guess there are different audiences. The people complaining about six's length are more like the parents of the kids who want to go CC it, Who go CC it, who want to go see it. Stuffs went up not a considerable amount, but a little bit. $72,000. Just under $800,000. They grossed just under 800,000, which means they probably took in a little over $700,000 this week. Not terrible, not their best week. Suffs has never been able to hit the million dollar mark in this part of its run. Maybe that'll happen later this year, I think. I honestly doubt it. Their highest grossing week was the week after the Tony Awards. So they performed, they won score in book and they were able to gross $942,000 and fully sell out the theater. Now Stuffs has been able to fill the music box relatively well for July. They were always in the 90 percentile. They were able to stick it out for most of summer. Last week they filled it up to 92% capacity. I think we're going to start seeing that number go down a bit. It is on tdf. So even if the grosses themselves go down, we might still be able to see them fill up the theater in some way. Discounted seats are better than not selling any seats at all. And I don't think this, this is probably a profitable week for Suffs. I would imagine that stuffs costs about 700 to $750,000 a week to run. Maybe 800,000, maybe. I'm going off of my knowledge of shows from last year because I know that Some Like it hot cost about 900 to 950. But one of the major running costs of Something Like It Hot was the creative team. They had very high royalties and they were not willing to take cuts on that. But it also had a very large cast, had a large orchestra. There was upkeep that needed to be done on costumes. They weren't doing any upkeep on the set, I can tell you that much. And that's not me being shady. I can tell you from people who were working in the theater that they were not spending money on like the Stage deck. So it just like turned a whole new color by the end of the run because of all the tapping. So I would imagine Suffs maybe stuff's costs about 800, maybe a little under, maybe a little more than that. So they definitely had some money making weeks this summer. This might be a money losing week or maybe just a little bit of money making. It's I think easy to sort of see the writing on the wall that Suffs is probably not long for this world. I would imagine a January closing. They have enough momentum to keep them going and then call it out before having what will most likely be two disastrous months with January and February. So we'll see. But I also know that with Stuffs a lot of people are avoiding it because they think it's too political and they don't want to deal with politics right now. I don't find Suffs terribly political. I mean it's very comforting in the progressiveness of its politics. It doesn't really challenge you in any way, but I guess if the idea of women voting is challenging to you, so be it. Next up is Book of Mormon which is no longer the 1.9, 1.8 million dollar a week juggernaut that it once was, but it is in an 8,500 seat theater. So grossing a million dollars at this point would know 13 years later would be considered a huge achievement. But they did gross $865,000, which from what I understand is still a money making week. They've had a couple of money losing weeks this year. There are a few times they were in the 700,000 Club, which is not great. This is a show that has made so much money. So if they have a handful of weeks where they lose, that's not any skin off their nose. I think that's the phrase. They were still able to fill the theater at 94% capacity on average. Good for them. Book of Mormon is another show where I don't think we're seeing it close up shop anytime soon. But we are now looking at it as a possible, a possibly expendable show, let's put it that way. I think we can look at Book of Mormon as something that might not be around in the next two to three years. Like it's. I think we're, it's on a similar plane right now as six of like they don't have anything to worry about right now. They don't have to close tomorrow. They don't even have to close six months from now. But they're no longer sitting so comfortably pretty that they aren't even gonna entertain the idea of closing. I think they're like, okay, we're about a year away from having that talk and, you know, maybe things will pick up for both shows. But that is where I sort of see both of them at right now. Great. Gatsby just had a really, really, really great week. They. Last week they were under a million for the first time since I think previews. They might have gone under a million dollars once or twice after they opened, but they've been able to pretty consistently gross over a million dollars since they opened. Which considering the bad reviews they got, my bad word of mouth on it, and the fact that they only were nominated for one Tony Award, costumes, which they won, but they weren't able to perform on the Tony Awards. They haven't done a lot of TV performances. They've mostly been doing social media and YouTube ads. And on top of that, the Broadway theater barn as it is, they have closed off the back section of the mezzanine to, you know, keep tickets scarce and make the Broadway seem a little more intimate. So they are selling just under 12,000 seats, which is. That is less than Harry Potter. That is less. That is fewer seats than Aladdin, fewer seats than the Lion King and Wicked. It's just, it's, it's. I think it's a little more than Back to the Future. Yeah, it's like 50 seats more than Back to the Future. And so for them to sell and, and make one point to gross $1.1 million this past week is very impressive. Good for them. Their highest ticket price was 277. Their average was 97, which means they've been able to do enough dynamic pricing that for all of the lottery seats that they sell, for any discounted seats that they sell, they've been able to sell enough full price seats that 1.1 is not bad. And Gatsby is expensive. This is not. Again, this is not a fuck you gross. This is not a look at us. We're doing amazing and we're not going anywhere. For years and years and years they have had better weeks than this. They've had a couple of better weeks than this for honestly most of the summer. Most of the summer they were averaging about 1.2. I think their highest was 1.3 million right after the Tony Awards. But yeah, they, they have not been below a million dollars since previews. Last week was the first time. Two weeks ago was the first time they were able. They were under a million. And it'll happen again. I think we're going to see it probably next week, if not a couple of weeks in October. Which is just to say that I don't think that Great Gatsby is a five or four year run. I think it's going to be a two year run maybe unless the, you know, gross really does a nosedive in the next couple of weeks. But I think that November and December is going to be very good for Great Gatsby. I think that January and February will be terrible for them as they will be for most shows. And it'll be interesting to see what happens when Jeremy Jordan and Ava Noplazada leave. Jeremy Jordan might be going into another show in the spring and bringing his fan base with him for that. So maybe they'll cast their replacements well. But yeah, I see Great Gatsby kind of capping off at two years. They are doing fine. They are not doing amazing. They were doing very amazing this summer. They are now back in the like. We're doing well. We're not doing amazing. We're doing well. Hills of California had four performances or four previews last week with a average capacity of 76%. Highest ticket price of 327 but an average ticket price of $77. That ain't great. Their gross was $279,000. So even if they did a full week and all of this was the same, that's an under $600,000 gross. Which. It's a play. It's a nearly three hour play. It's a British transfer with no real stars. You have to imagine that they took all this into account and hoping that reviews and word of mouth will get people in the door and that just might happen. I know a lot of people who are very interested in this play but it's an uphill battle. This is not something that they're going to be able to advertise as Hot must see good time. They got to really build on the prestige factor and the fact that it's only running for a certain amount of time because then boop goes into the Broadhurst in the spring. So we'll see what happens. This is again, this is their first four performances. I'm interested to see what the rest of previews look like. I would imagine once they go into the full eight performances a week run, I don't know if they're gonna really go beyond 600k a week. And it's an expensive show, it's a big cast but. And half of them are imports so there's like housing involved with them, but I don't know. We'll see. I don't right now. Hills of California isn't off to a great start. Lion King, thank you. Next $1.7 million. Big surprise. Not totally sold out for the week, but very close to it. Disney has figured out the pricing model for Lion King a long time ago. They've got nothing to worry about. The Notebook. We already know it's closing. Grosses have been steadily going up since they announced closing. But because they don't close till December, we're not in a red hot rush for everyone to see it. They grossed $670,000 last week, up 80k from the week before. That's, you know, the right direction. It's still not quite enough. Definitely not as good as when they opened. Remember there were their previews, they were grossing like a million. And then 800k. They haven't been near that in a long time. So there's a reason why it's closing. As we get closer to its closing, I'm sure it'll go up a bit, but I think we're going to see it fluctuating in the 500 to $600,000 club for the rest of September and October. Outsiders going down $40,000 and going from standing room to 97% capacity. But $358 top ticket price, $158 average. That is one of the highest right now. I think the only thing higher is either McNeil and Cabaret or just Cabaret. Outsiders is in a theater where they have about a little over a thousand seats. The Jacobs, which is where company was at, they are grossing 1.2 right now. 1.2 million, just under 1.3. They are doing just fine. Outsiders is going to be around for a minute, so buckle up folks. That's not going anywhere. Next up, the Roommate, which went down $122,000 from last week from a sold out week to 96% capacity. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that three of the performances from last week, Mia Farrow was out. She had Covid. So actually the Saturday matinee was cancelled and I believe the Saturday night show went on and Marcia Mason went on for both of those shows. So there was. Sorry, no, there were, so there were two shows. Two shows were canceled. So they only did six performances. So that tells you one thing. That's part of the reason why it went down so much. But also Mia Farrow being out shows you that she was a bit, that she's a bit of the draw. Probably the bigger draw than Patti LuPone. They also had opening night last week, so there was a whole performance that was comped. That being said, they're in the Booth Theater where they grossed $341,000. And while that is significantly down from last week, last week it was $468,000. I would imagine that's about what it costs to run the Roommate. I believe that Patty and Mia don't come cheap. Even though the show is just them. They are expensive. You bring them in and they alone are, if not six digits into the running cost, close to it. So I would imagine that this is, if not profitable, close to profitable. Last week was probably profitable for them. I'm interested to see what happens to the Roommate for the rest of its run. It is a. It'll. It is a limited run. They did not get the best of reviews. So I don't see this being a super. A super smash. They are selling the theater. They are filling the theater, but not at a super high rate. Their highest ticket price was 297 last week with an average of 76. Again, part of that is opening comps for critics, comps for Tony voters. Again, Mia Farrow being out. But you know, the next two or three weeks, take a look at the average ticket price, see how much further it goes up. So even if they're at 100% capacity, if they are not average ticket pricing of 110, they're not selling every seat at the value that they would like to sell it at. Next up is Water for Elephants, which went up a little bit, but they definitely got hit by Grant Gustin leaving. Water for elephants just grossed $740,000. They filled the theater to 75% capacity, which is up 7% from the week before. The Imperial, that's a big theater. That's about 1,400 seats per night that they got to fill 11,000 weekly. And that is also an expensive show to run. Almost a million dollar running cost. They're doing their best to cut corners on it financially. They're trying to have as much coverage with the cast as they can so everything is safe. But not in a way that they are paying a million people a weekly salary. I have a few friends who are in and out of that building a lot. I do think that the writing is on the wall with this show. I think we're looking at a December closing, possibly sooner. But I imagine they're going to want to make money out of Thanksgiving and Christmas. And also if they close by Christmas, New Year's they'll have run about a little over 300 performances which is at this point a respectable number for a show that will not have recouped. May be able to recoup on the road, but I doubt it. It's expensive, but $740,000 not what you want for water for elephants. Again, less than into the run. We're at like the six month mark for this show and yes, they didn't win any Tony awards, but they were nominated. They did have a Tony performance. The book is well known, the movie is well known. The acrobatics of it all is very exciting for people. This show was grossing over a million dollars towards the end of previews, right after they opened. Like the trend for ticket sales was up, it was looking good. And then somewhere in the summer they kind of lost steam and they were never really able to get it back. And now they are getting back to their low side and I don't see them making it back to the million dollar club on their own without holidays and without the impending closing. You know, ticking time bomb of like you have now or never to see this show. Next up we have Wicked. Bing, bang, boom. 1.8 million in that barn of the Gershwin. Again, this is a show that has been around for 21 years. They are still filling that theater, if not completely to capacity, almost to capacity, which is insane. The movie coming out in November is definitely adding hype to the show. Them having the 20 year anniversary last year, you know, brought a lot of luster to the show. They have been doing very well with replacement casting. Not necessarily star casting, but quality casting. And similar to Lion King, it seems that the producers of Wicked have figured out dynamic pricing in a way that people will pay to see it. Maybe not as much as they would have when it was new and red hot, but a top ticket price of $275 for a 20 year run average of 121. That is a higher average than Water for Elephants, than the Roommate, it's higher than the Notebook and it's higher than the Great Gatsby and Book of Mormon and Suffs. It's higher than 6 and once upon a mattress, it's just under MJ. But again, MJ is 20 years younger than Wicked and actually has fewer seats which means scarcity. You can increase the ticket price. So yeah, Wicked. I don't know what to tell you. I don't know if this show will ever die. I think this and Lion King are shows similar to Phantom where it's like just gonna Keep running Energizer Bunny of it all. And then we got Yellowface at the Todd Haymes Theater. With three performances at a subscriber based house, $148,000 with an average ticket price of $70. They were able to fill the theater pretty well. 97% capacity. So that's great. I'm sure word of mouth and reviews will help with this show. Similar to McNeil, we have subscribers that definitely fill the theater but don't necessarily keep it at a high average ticket price. But as we see with McNeil, you can't solely blame subscribers. Yellowface is on TDF. It is being papered. They are trying to get butts into seats and get word of mouth going. The Haynes Theater is not a theater where you're really going to gross a million dollars every week. It's simply too small. But you can have very, you know, profitable, high grossing weeks. All you have to do is look at doubt. That show ran from February to April of 2024. This year they consistently were in the 400, $500,000 club. You look at Danny DeVito and I need that, which I think he that show was grossing like in the 700 thousands pretty consistently. So yellowface, even though it's only three performances, that's $50,000 per show. Which means if this was an eight performance week, they would have been grossing $400,000. Again, not terrible at all. It can get better from there and I think it will. I think it will. I look forward to seeing Yellowface. I'm a big fan of David Henry Huang and Lee Silverman and I think it'll be something very special. That's it for now guys. Please stay tuned next week. It'll be again next Friday for my interview with our six time Tony nominee and my announcement and urge for you all about my play. And you'll know what I mean by that when that episode comes out. I hope you learned a little something from this. As we talked through these grosses, I know that I rambled. Part of this was me kind of just going off on little tangents. But I hope as you looked through these grosses with me, we were able to learn a little something about trends, trajectories, what certain numbers mean, how you look at the average ticket price, how you look at at capacity, you look at the number of seats a theater holds and that definitely has an influence on the number of dollars it brings in. And then again, remember, 6 to 10% of what you see in the gross is not what the show takes in. There are Many other factors that come into play with that. And when people talk about running costs, start with if you're at a loss of what a show might cost to run, start with labor and go from there. Look at how many people are on stage, how many people are backstage, and go from there. And then start guesstimating. And so when you know that and you read these grosses, you have a better sense of what kind of danger or safety a show you might like is in. So from this past week, I think we can safely say that the Outsiders is in no danger right now. Wicked. No danger of closing. Neither is MJ or the Lion King or Aladdin. I think that we can see Suffs and Back to the Future and Water for Elephants. Writing is on the wall with that. Things like Book of Mormon and 6. No immediate danger, but they are softening. Hamilton is softening, but not to the extent of Book of Mormon or Six. It's still doing very well. Moulin Rouge softening, but not in any danger. When I say softening, I'm talking like, think about these shows when they were at their peak. Moulin Rouge grossing $2 million, 1.8, 1.9 pre Covid and then holidays now of like 1.5, 1.6. So like 1.3 is great. They shouldn't be mad about that. But you think about them when they were new and they were special, and you think about them now and you go, okay, like they're doing well, but they are no longer making as what we like to call fuck you money. So these are shows that are finding their grooves, doing well. They'll probably soften more as time goes on and more new shows come in. But you know, when a show reaches the four or five year mark and they're still doing over a million dollars and it's not really fluctuating too much, then I think you can safely say that it's found its groove and is, you know, if not a total lifer, it's in for a long haul. And I think we see that with a couple of these shows. That's it. Thank you so much for listening, guys. Again, check out next week. And then after that is when we do Grab Bag, which is gonna be very exciting. Please leave a rating or a review if you'd like for the podcast. It really helps with the algorithm and helping people find us. This week I am going to close us out with. You know what? It's so random. And I think it's just because I'm looking at her picture right now across my bedroom, but Natasha Richardson and cabaret, specifically her don't tell Mama, because I think she's fun and funky in that and very sexy. And I want more people to be in love with that performance like I am. So we will see you guys next Friday, and I look forward to explaining a bit more about what's going on there next Friday. So take it away, Natasha.
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Bye. Hush up? Don't tell Mama? Shush up? Don't tell mama? Don't tell mama? Whatever you do? If you had a secret? You bet I would keep it? I want another girl on you? I'm breaking every promise that I gave her? So won't you kindly do a girl? Oh, great big favor? And please, my sweet potato? Keep this from the major? Though my dance is not.