High ticket prices are fuelling a Broadway boom

New York

MUSICALS about the aftermaths of a teenage suicide and a terror attack proved unlikely sensations. Star turns by Bette Midler, Josh Groban, Jake Gyllenhaal and Glenn Close added sizzle. And, led by Hamilton and Hello, Dolly!, the hottest shows started charging once unthinkably high prices for the best seats.

The Broadway season that ended on Sunday was one for the record books. Box-office grosses, which have been climbing since 2013, rose 5.5 per cent, to US$1.449 billion, a new high, according to figures released on Tuesday by the Broadway League, an industry trade group.

The growth, though, was fuelled not by attendance, but by ticket cost. Producers, perfecting a strategy called dynamic pricing, used increasingly sophisticated analytics to adjust ticket prices to reflect varying demand on different days of the week and for different sections of a theatre.

Hamilton, which continues to play to sold-out houses 21 months after opening, led the way, setting a record box-office price of US$849 for many orchestra seats, in an effort to recapture profits being lost to resellers. Hello, Dolly!, starring Midler, has a top ticket of US$748; Sunday in the Park With George, starring Gyllenhaal, was charging US$499 for its most sought-after seats; and The Book of Mormon tops out at US$477.

The new musicals are a touch less aggressive with pricing as they build their audiences: Dear Evan Hansen, about a high school student whose life is changed by the suicide of a classmate, is selling its best seats for US$397, while Come From Away,about a Canadian town that welcomed diverted airline flights after the Sept 11 attacks, has a top price of US$297.

There are bargains available for all but the buzziest shows, but still: The average price paid for a Broadway ticket during the 2016-17 season was a record US$109, up from US$103 the previous season.

And with several big-brand titles on the way - stage adaptations of the hit film Frozen and the best-selling Harry Potter books are scheduled to open next spring - Broadway's blockbuster-led boom seems unlikely to end any time soon. It's transforming the balance sheet of an industry which over the last three decades has fought its way back from a sorry period in which shows were scarce and theatres were being demolished.

"I've been on Broadway since 1982, and I've never seen such stunning numbers in my life," said Barry Weissler, a longtime producer whose current shows include Chicago and Waitress. "It's not about us charging more, it's about the public wanting to see something they're willing to pay for, and it's an amazing credit to the work being done on Broadway."

The big numbers mask continuing challenges for the industry. Broadway's success is lopsided: Much of the profit goes to a small handful of shows, while a majority flop. Over the last 12 months, 81 productions played at some point during the season; about half of all the box-office revenue went to just 10 of those shows.

"The hits are bigger than they have been previously, but the shows that are not big boffo hits are struggling more," said Jordan Roth, the president of Jujamcyn Theaters, which operates five Broadway houses.

For the first time in four years, overall attendance was off slightly - down 0.4 per cent, to 13.3 million, at the 41 theatres in and around Times Square that constitute Broadway. That is partly because there were 4.1 per cent fewer so-called playing weeks - the total amount of time in which theatres were occupied by shows - than in the previous season. And attendance that dipped only incrementally is arguably impressive in an era when foreign tourism appears to be stalling, and traditional entertainment has been struggling - ratings for network television shows have been sharply down, for example.

"If you look at other forms of entertainment media, we're doing better than probably anybody else in the realm," said Thomas Schumacher, the president of Disney Theatrical Productions, whose current shows are Aladdin and The Lion King (with top prices of US$228 and US$225).

But some say Broadway needs to be concerned about raising the number of ticket buyers, rather than just the price of those tickets. "We have to be adding new audience for our long-term health," said the producer Ken Davenport, who is bringing a revival of Once on This Island to Broadway this fall. NYTIMES