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Welcome to your Broadway Radio Grosses report for the 51st week of the 2025, 2026 Broadway season, the one that wrapped up on Sunday, May 17th. My name is Matt Timineni. On this episode, we will run through all of the data from last week's Broadway Grosses report as well as talk through some of the big news that has happened over the last few days since Monday's episode of last week on Broadway. But let's start with the box office. Despite the fact that Book of Mormon is still unable to have performances, Broadway did have 40 shows on the boards last week because of the introduction of celebrity autobiography. So 40 shows across 41 houses. Hopefully very soon we will have Book of Mormon back over at the Eugene o' Neill Theater. We'll talk about that here in a little bit. For the most part though, grosses stayed pretty much equal to the previous week, as did attendance. The grosses were down like $131,000 to come in at 38,166,520. And while that is flat from the previous week, it is still down 14% or $6.2 million from last year. Attendance last week was at 316,920, again fairly equal to last week, down about 1456 people, but it is down 6% from last year. The one bright side to this is the fact that the average ticket price was at $120.43, up 14 cents from last week, but down $11.38 from last year, 9% drop. So the one good thing about not having all of these star studded shows on Broadway is that the average ticket price is down a little bit. But it does not seem to be spreading the extra money across other shows leading the grossest ranks Last week was Every Brilliant thing in Daniel Radcliffe's penultimate week in the show. It came in at $1,976,168. And you might be thinking, yes, of course everybody wants to see Harry Potter before he leaves the show, but where is Harry Potter and the Cursed Child? Why is that not at number one? Well, it is all the way down over a million dollars behind Every Brilliant Thing because Radcliffe's former film co star Tom Felton was on vacation. But we'll get to that and we'll talk about that here in a minute. But it is a fairly startling drop when we get there. Every Brilliant Thing was followed by Hamilton at 1.89 million, the Lion King at 1.71, followed by Death of a Salesman just a smidge behind that and then rounding out the top five was oh Mary at $1.58 million. The rest of the show's north of seven figures in descending order are MJ Giant, Ragtime, Moulin Rouge, maybe Happy Ending, the Lost Boys, Wicked Aladdin, Joe Turner's Come and Gone and the Rocky Horror Show. Then we had Buena Vista Social Club, Proof Cat's, the Jellicoe, Ball Chess, and then finally Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, all north of 900,000. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child dropped 1,375,443 bucks to come in at $924,641. Obviously that is a startling decline for any show, but fortunately it will only be temporary for them as Tom Felton is on vacation, having extended his run in the show through November. Now I mentioned Celebrity autobiography. It had three shows last week and it brought in, oh boy, 33,953 bucks. Now a little over 11k per show is not a sustainable business model there. But we knew that it was going to struggle probably overall, but at least at first because they announced the show less than two weeks before performances began. So that is not a way to build up in advance, to build up a long list of people who have bought tickets or even have heard about it, had an opportunity to hear about it. The average ticket price for last week's three performances was $15.22. You will be hard pressed to get a hot dog and a bottle of water at a cart in Times Square for that price. So not looking good for Celebrity Autobiography. But one thing that I guess is a little bit in their favor is the fact that it was not the worst in terms of percent capacity over at the Shubert Theater. And the Shubert's not a small house. It was actually fifth from the bottom at 65.93%. But there were four shows below it. Chicago still trying to rebound from the loss of Whitney Levitt. They did announce on Wednesday that the great and the good Krista Rodriguez would be joining the production. Love Krista. Don't think she's going to do a whole lot to change that. Then you had stranger things, the first shadow at 63 points. Then getting into the 50s, we had my beloved sixth musical at just under 58%. And then beaches, which we'll talk about here in a minute, all the way down at 44.4% capacity. In total, following 51 weeks in the entire Broadway season, Broadway has grossed $1,870,020,438 despite the declines in the spring box office, that is still up 4.4percent over last year with total attendance up 2% to come in at $14,238,450. In total, 21 of Broadway's 40 playing shows last week played to 90% capacity or more with Ragtime in Every Brilliant Thing right at full capacity. Death of a Salesman in Hamilton a bit over and then kind of back where it belongs just in time led the way at 101.97% capacity. It seems like it took a couple weeks of the jar drawer fans to get their tickets and make it over to Circle in the Square, but it is now leading that statistic like it was during Jonathan Groff's run. However, it is not grossing as much as it was during the Jonathan Grof heyday. Last week it brought in $890,315. That is still roughly half to 60% of what it was doing even during the cold winter months with Jonathan Groff in there. And obviously it is now competing against all of the new shows and everything. So that is a factor to be played in there. But it's interesting to me that with people still coming out to see this show with Jeremy Jordan, I wonder what it will do moving forward. I'd originally heard that the show was most likely to close in January. I believe Leave Jeremy is going to leave sometime in the fall, maybe after Labor Day, but perhaps they can convince him to extend into January. But it would probably take another fairly big star to come in and keep this show running beyond January, despite the fact that earlier this week the production did announce that it has recouped its $12.5 million Broadway capitalization, which is pretty cheap for any Broadway musical at this point. It becomes the first musical from last season 202425 to announce its recruitment and the fourth show first musical to announce during this theatrical season. The other three were plays every Brilliant Thing, Gadot and Art. But it is interesting with the announcement of Recoupment and the fact that last week it announced that it was going on tour. Will it keep going? Will it try to make it through another spring season? I don't know, but it is. This is certainly a show that has been successful thanks to the strength of its stars, the original star with Grof and now seemingly with Jeremy Jordan as well. But it'll be interesting to see what happens with the rest of this show's run now that it has officially become a Broadway hit. Now I mentioned the fact that just in time last week already announced that it is going to be heading out on a national tour because we are in the middle of Broadway's spring road conference. Two other shows, both Tony nominees, the this year announced national tours this week. The first one was Titanique, which will do the whole big full circuit of a big national tour for a musical. It'll launch in 2027. They already know that they're going to be going to Los Angeles, San Diego, Charlotte, OKC, Washington D.C. and others. Obviously, full dates, cast, all of that stuff will be announced. The other one, which was the one that was a little bit more interesting to me was every Brilliant Thing, which will begin a national tour in Seattle next year. I'm interested whether this will play the traditional big Broadway touring houses like the Dr. Phillips center here where I'm at, or if it'll play in smaller venues. And then the first thing that came to mind to me was whether or not they would have one person do the entire tour, whether that's a big star, a Broadway star, a familiar name, or somebody who's not familiar really at all, or if they would have bigger names come in for shorter runs. Kind of like we are seeing on Broadway as of now. From what I understand, they are looking to get one person to lead the entire tour, but they don't have anybody nailed down quite yet. So it'll be interesting to see how this tour plays out over the next year. But moving into some conversation about some shows that will hopefully do well on tour but did not have necessarily the runs that you would have hoped for on board Broadway. We've gotten two shows announcing closing this week. The first was Death Becomes her, which will kind of surprisingly wrap up its run on Sunday, June 28, over at the Lunt Fontan Theater. I say that's interesting because it's gotten this far into close in the middle of the summer is a little surprising. Of course, tourism and travel is down significantly this year for many, many reasons. One, the United States standing in the world and how difficult it's making people people to get into the country and then the price of gas impacting everything. So the benefits of staying open during the summer might not be as good as they normally are, but it will wrap up its run on Sunday, June 28. That means it will not have recouped its $31.5 million capitalization despite playing for 20 months on Broadway. I think the the timing, as I said, was was interesting. I do have to wonder if that means another show once the Lunt, earlier in the fall than maybe normal instead of maybe Allowing Death Becomes her to play through Labor Day. Maybe they want to be starting during Labor Day. If that happened, that means between loadout of Death becomes Her, which I imagine is is fairly big to then have another show load in that would probably take up more most of July. So if a show wants to begin performances around Labor Day, that would mean they would need August to kind of do tech and everything. So that would make sense. And you know, as far as I'm concerned, if you're going to do all of that, if you're going to move a show out in the middle of the summer and then load a show in to begin around Labor Day, I would certainly not do that for one night only. The other one that announced closing is honestly the only surprising thing about this is that it took so long and that is Beaches. It will close this Sunday, May 24th over at the Majestic Theater. The show has really struggled to find an audience and the reviews did not help. It will close earlier than it originally planned. It was always scheduled to be a limited run, but it was supposed to go through September. Now the show is planned to head out on a national tour, but who knows at this point point? So if you want to see Jessica Vosk, Kelly Barrett on Broadway together, you have one week to do that. All right, let's run through some real quick show and casting news. I said this on last week on Broadway that the quick turnaround that the Book of Mormon was hoping to have to begin performances Tomorrow on Thursday, May 21st seemed a little ambitious. And over the weekend that proved to be true because on Tuesday they announced that they were going to be pushing back six days and they are now expecting to reopen on Wednesday, May 27, a week from today. The Ambassador Theater Group who owns the the Eugene o' Neill Theater said, quote, we were encouraged by the speed of the initial work in the theater, but recovery took longer than expected this past weekend. Shocking that a construction project in midtown Manhattan took longer than expected. Whoever would have guessed? Again, I would love for this to come back next week. That is a very quick turnaround for a three alarm fire. But hopefully this is the last update they have to make to when the show will be back on the boards. Now I mentioned every brilliant thing quite a bit earlier and Daniel Radcliffe will be wrapping up his run this week. He'll be followed by Mariska Hargitay who will begin performances next Tuesday on the 26th. But now we know who is going to be taking over over for her after her extended run ends on July 5th. I referenced this on Monday's episode of Last Week on Broadway. I gave you some hints. Did you pick up on them? And that is the star of Girlfriends and Blackish and Solo Traveling, Tracy Ellis Ross. She will step into the role over at the Hudson theater from Tuesday, July 7 through Sunday, August 9. As I've said before, I don't think that ATG is going to extend extend this show again beyond that because it obviously has things it wants to bring in as well. But I would not be surprised because this show has already announced Recoupment. It has a steady stream of stars coming in. We've seen, you know, stars do plays, do this, do oh Mary, and it seems like that is a cool thing to do right now. So maybe if they can find another home, we can see even more people come in and do every brilliant thing, which would be very fun. Now this is something that I've been hearing for a long time. And now Philip Boroff over at the Broadway Journal is reporting that the Issa Davis and Lin Manuel Miranda musical Warriors will be on Broadway in the spring of next season. So March 2027. No theater obviously has been announced, but the plan is to do a full workshop presentation later this summer, late August, early September, and then to bring it to Broadway in the spring of next year. The workshop version of the show, at least, and I would then assume the Broadway version will be directed by Jenny Koons and choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler. This is based obviously on the novel and then the film the Warriors. But now for this musical adaptation, instead of the warriors, that gang is going to be played by women. On the album that they did as a kind of like the concept album. The warriors were played by Anissa Folds, Amber Gray, Sasha Hutchings, Giselle Jimenez, Jasmine, Cephas Jones, Kenita R. Miller, Philip Assu, and Julia Harriman. Other people on the album included the likes of Lauryn Hill, Colman Domingo, Marc Anthony, Utkarsh Ambedkar, Alex Boniello, Casey Likes Billy Porter, Michaela J, Michael Kilgore, Josh Henry, David, Patrick Kelly, Busta Rhymes, Cameron, Nas, Ghostface Killa, rza. You know, who knows if any of these people would be on the album. I can't imagine Lauryn Hill or Ghostface Killa being in a Broadway musical. But that initial group of warriors very well could be, especially considering that a number of them have worked with Lynn in the past. Between Anissa, Sasha, Jasmine, Philippa, you know, this very likely could have a number of those folks in the Broadway production. We will probably hear about the cast for the workshop when it actually happens. So that will undoubtedly give us a pretty good indication as to who will be leading the Broadway production this time next year. Baz Bama Boy from Deadline is reporting. Broadway alum and Stranger Things star Gaten Matarazzo will be leading a 30th anniversary production of Rent in London's West End this fall. It will be directed by Luke Shepard, who just won an Olivier for Paddington, and it will play the Duke of York's theater beginning on September 26th. I have heard that this will more than likely end up on Broadway as well, and that Gaten will not be the only person known to pop culture fans in the principal cast. There will be some people from outside of the world of theater, which makes sense. That's actually how they originally cast Adam Pascal. He was not a theater person. He was a rock person. I think we could get somebody like that. And then I think the cast will be rounded out by some appropriately young stars as well. So we will see what happens with this. I've already had multiple people text me and say, hey, are we going to London to see this? I don't know if it's coming to Broadway. Yeah, I might. I might be able to wait for this, but you know how much I love Rent, so. So we will have to wait and see. All right, everybody, that's all that I have for you today. Thank you so much for supporting Broadway radio. If you want more Broadway radio, head over to patreon.com broadwayradio again, thank you for listening. This has been Matt Tamineni, and I'll talk to you soon.