The Broadway League, which announced last summer that it would not release weekly box office figures – known in the industry as the grosses – due to the modified and even erratic performance schedules of this year’s productions, has decided to release weekly box office totals, the trade organization said today.
“Due to the increased demand for how Broadway is doing,” said League President Charlotte St. Martin in a statement, “each week we are going to share a composite of the grosses, the capacity for the week, the grosses for the week, and the number of performances accomplished for the week. We will also include a season to date number for each of these categories.”
In other words, the show-by-show figures traditionally released by the League will remain undisclosed, prohibiting an official accounting of how each specific show is faring at the box office. Instead, only the total amount grossed by all Broadway productions for the week will be released, at least a partial marker of the industry’s economic status.
The tally for the week ending Oct. 24 for the 26 shows currently in Broadway venues is $22,164,602, with total attendance (i.e., the number of seats sold) at 176,083. That attendance figure reflects 85.16 percent of capacity. In all, the 26 productions played a total of 174 performances, a figure that indicates an average of about 7 weekly performances per show, or one fewer than the traditional 8.
In all, Broadway productions for the season that officially began Aug. 4 have grossed a combined $105,460,347, with attendance of 813,267 at 85.94% of capacity. The figures represent 823 performances total.
Based on the figures, last week’s average ticket price for a Broadway production was about $126, with the season-to-date average slightly higher at $130.
The productions currently performing on Broadway include are Ain’t Too Proud, Aladdin, Caroline, or Change, Chicago, Chicken & Biscuits, Come From Away, Dana H., David Byrne’s American Utopia, Freestyle Love Supreme, Girl From the North Country, Hadestown, Hamilton, Is This a Room, Jagged Little Playbill, Lackawanna Blues, The Lehman Trilogy, The Lion King, Moulin Rouge! The Musical!, Mrs. Doubtfire, The Phantom of the Opera, Thoughts of A Colored Man, Tina, To Kill A Mockingbird, Six, Waitress and Wicked.
All figures courtesy of the trade group Broadway League.