Broadway Grosses: Week Ending 5/19/13

Good to see Cinderella climb again and it appears Jane is helping Annie.

What was going on last week? Basically every single musical climbed in gross. I would have thought Mother's Day Weekend would be a stronger week that this past one. Summer vacation hasn't started yet. ANNIE had Jane Lynch and Sell out shows are still sell outs but even NICE WORK, CINDERELLA, etc. all had big jumps. Anyone know why? Graduations maybe?

I'm not surprised to see the grosses for `Cinderella' go up. When I went to see the show yesterday it was very crowded.

I really don't think Ann is losing money. Like we say every week, it's just not making money.

I've been thinking this has been a pretty great season, business-wise, for the Great White Way as a whole. I decided to go through a (thoroughly arbitrary) rubric to test this, which took me to looking through the years in roughly this week on the calendar and seeing how many shows were simply 100+% sold in terms of attendance. There are 7 shows that were over that threshhold this week. That, to me, is an extremely healthy state of affairs. The highest similar number I could find for any other year of this young century (so far) was five, with most years since 2000 averaging 2 or 3.

There are, of course, other measuring sticks to use to make a similar kind of evaluation (gross potential %, total attendance across all theatres, total gross), and the current success of these seven (and the other 10 shows that were over 90% capacity for the week) may also either contribute or be partially attributed to the somewhat disheartening number of vacant houses at present, but this little arbitrary exercise to me suggests that we are having a tremendous season right now.

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Anything over 100% equates to standing room positions sold.

Oh that makes sense. Duh...I should have thought of that.

Thanks again.

I'm sure it's possible that some people were in that circumstance, but I doubt JEKYLL's closing affected any of these shows in the slightest based on the dismal attendance JEKYLL had in the first place.

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The amount over 100% is not necessarily related to standing room, though it's part of the equation. But it is generally more a function of the number of premium tickets sold, because premium pricing is not figured into gross potential. Of course, the more premium seats sold, the more standing room is sold also, because ticket demand is so high. But premium pricing is the primary reason that shows do more than 100% of gross potential. If the regular ticket price is, say, $147 and it goes as a premium seat for $250, it gets counted as $103 over potential.

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anyone know why Matilda isn't selling SRO yet??

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Don't cancellations also factor for a show's grossing over 100%? If the same seat is sold at full-price twice for a sold-out event and the original ticketholder is not refunded, doesn't that also play a part?

^Yes, although many shows don't have cancellation lines and those that do often sell at most a handful of tickets per performance through cancellations so it's mostly a result of premium priced tickets.

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