Thanksgiving Breaks Many Broadway Records
The Great White Way had much to be thankful for this week.
After a middling autumn, buyers surged to Broadway over Thanksgiving weekend, breaking records left and right. Thirty-four shows cumulatively took in $35.28 million, the best turkey haul in biz history. Attendance was down slightly from last year, mostly due to a smaller number of shows, but sales and the ticket prices ($124 avg.) were higher than they've ever been for the frame.
Leading the charge was juggernaut Hamilton, which beat record-holder Wicked for highest gross in a single week, at a staggering $3.26 million. The average ticket leapt to $303 per seat, spurred by the planned increase of premium tickets to $998, the highest in history. Anyone thinking Hamilton's shelf life would wane without the original cast better have some humble pie leftovers.
But Lin-Manuel Miranda wasn't the only composer making massive moolah. Andrew Lloyd Webber pulled a historic hat trick: each of his three shows (School Of Rock, Phantom Of The Opera, and Cats) grossed over $1 million, the first time a composer has accomplished such a feat. School Of Rock had its best week of the year, adding a performance and supplanting The Book Of Mormon as the fifth highest-grossing show overall.
Classic musicals reaped the biggest rewards, while plays and new tuners saw smaller boosts. Wicked, Aladdin, and The Lion King all had increases of $600k+ (and totals upward of $2 million). Fiddler On The Roof played its best week since Easter, stepping back into the $1 Million Club alongside family favorite Matilda, while Chicago beat its 2015 numbers by 24%. Newbies In Transit, A Bronx Tale and Dear Evan Hansen saw only moderate gains.
But a few newer pieces had strong showings. Oh, Hello had its best week to date at $618k, and twice broke the house record for a single performance; Waitress broke its own house record for the fifth time since opening in April. And The Front Page remained the most lucrative non-musical on Broadway, seventh overall for pure gross, with $1.3 million to its name this week.
Josh Groban also re-established his box office clout. After missing performances last week due to illness, he returned to The Great Comet and made it the highest grossing show, measured by its maximum potential gross. Fans shelled out for premium tickets, pushing it to 130% MPG and putting it almost $400k above last week's numbers.
Not everyone was gobbling cash, though. After announcing an early closing, the revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses tumbled a whopping $251k, and magic act The Illusionists fell below par in its first week. $702k sounds solid, but it's less than half the potential gross, and far below the Thanksgiving bows for each of its previous incarnations.
Historically, the week after Thanksgiving is not nearly as kind, but Christmas and New Years are close, and stand to break even bigger records.
