Grosses keep growing on Broadway, but so do expenses
Question: In today's theater, what keeps swelling like a star's ego?
Answer: Broadway grosses. More people are buying tickets, and paying more for them, than ever before.
As theater folk welcome Nicholas Nickleby to help launch the new season, they can look back on the 1980-81 year and pat their pocketbooks with pride. Attendance was 11 million, up 15% from the record-breaking year before, and box-office receipts tallied $196.9 million, almost quadruple those of the 1969-70 doldrums. A new generation of out-of-town and foreign visitors who love New York also love the New York theater; one-fourth of Broadway ticket buyers are from outside the metropolitan area. A new generation of entertainment consumers, attracted by television commercials, half-price tickets made available on the day of the performance, and the ease of ordering by phone, has developed the Broadway habit, presaging financial health for years to come.
For the eighth straight year —since the commercial theater snapped out of its early-'70s slump —the Great White Way is coated with happy black ink.
Even so, the custodians of the inkwell—the producers, directors and theater owners—disagree noisily over just how successful Broadway is, and what that success means. Bernard Jacobs, who with his partner Gerald Schoenfeld helped restore to grandeur the venerable Shubert Organization —and with it much of Broadway—sees a cloud in the silver lining. "As grosses increase," says Jacobs, "so do costs. Move the decimal point over a few digits, and you're in the same place you were 54 years ago." In 1927, he notes, a straight play could be produced for $10,000 to $40,000 and a musical for $35,000 to $70,000. Last year it cost $450,000 to bring Lanford Wilson's Fifth of July to Broadway; and Ballroom, Michael Bennett's intended successor to A Chorus Line, was a $2 million flop —figures that help explain the dizzying rise in ticket prices (see chart).
Producer-Director Hal Prince attributes Broadway's boffo box office to "a very few very big hit musicals. The moneymen tend to become cautious when they see how huge the profit is with those shows —and how big a gamble trying anything else is." Producer Alexander H. Cohen puts it another way: "Broadway is too successful. Hit shows are running longer, and there are fewer theaters available than in the past. That makes for a major booking squeeze. With space at a premium, the theater owners may soon be closing shows that are making a profit in order to make way for shows that might do better. There will be no room for the modest success. But let's face it: Broadway is a business. Making bucks is the bottom line.