Ticket prices - from 1984 to now

[rayoflight104]

Posted: 4/30/08 at 9:05pm

I've been on livebroadway.com trying to find the average ticket price for a show starting in 1984.. Does anyone know of any other sites that might have this information?

[george95]

Posted: 4/30/08 at 9:07pm

On this site, you can check the historical grosses......They will tell you the average ticket price and the top ticket price back to 1996 only though.

If you really want you can do the math and figure out the average ticket price pre-1996.

[Gothampc]

Posted: 4/30/08 at 9:10pm

Musical or Play?

[rayoflight104]

Posted: 4/30/08 at 9:14pm

If they are split between musical and play then i'll just have to combine them. The average for the two together would work.

[rayoflight104]

Posted: 4/30/08 at 9:18pm

Also - it is the producer that sets the ticket prices, right? before they show opens...

[Gothampc]

Posted: 4/30/08 at 9:36pm

$47.50 was the top ticket price for a musical.

"La Cage aux Folles" is raising its top ticket price $2.50 to $47.50 on July 2, making it the most expensive show now on Broadway and the second most expensive in Broadway history, behind the $100 for the eight-and- a-half-hour "Nicholas Nickleby."

PS: Don't buy the article. Go to a library and see if they have microfiche of the NY Times or a Lexus/Nexus or newspaper database.

Link

Updated On: 4/30/08 at 09:36 PM

[defyingravity07]

Posted: 4/30/08 at 9:44pm

When my French teacher saw the original Guys and Dolls in 1950, she paid $25 for Orchestra.

[bertandrew2]

Posted: 4/30/08 at 10:01pm

I doubt Guys and Dolls cost $25 in the 1950's. My first Broadway show that I paid for was in 1978, Liza Minelli in THE ACT and I paid $25.

Looking this up on the NY Times, I found this quote:

When “They’re Playing Our Song” opened in 1979, Mr. Wachtel said, the top ticket cost $27. Three years later the top ticket to “Cats” cost $45, a jump of 66 percent. Prices continued to rise over the next decade, albeit a bit more slowly. But they did not end up scaring people away. “Shows used to say, ‘O.K., we get to the winter, we die,’ ” said Emanuel Azenberg, a longtime producer and manager on Broadway who also cited the importance of new, more sophisticated accounting methods. “But now you could sustain the bad winter as long as spring was coming again because of the prices.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/theater/10robe.html?pagewanted=2&sq=broadway%20ticket%20price%201978&st=nyt&scp=7

[bertandrew2]

Posted: 4/30/08 at 10:02pm

Oh No! I spelled Minnelli wrong. Sorry Liza.

[defyingravity07]

Posted: 4/30/08 at 10:04pm

It was either 25 or 12 I forgot which.

[p.s.]

Posted: 5/1/08 at 9:32am

I've been on livebroadway.com trying to find the average ticket price for a show starting in 1984.. Does anyone know of any other sites that might have this information?

This was asked, and I thought answered, a few months ago.

Are there any good news articles or analysis that has been done on broadway show ticket prices? I'm trying to research the history of the price of admission to shows...

There is a lot of information within Broadway Grosses (Find it on this web site). If you want detail you can select by week back to 1984, sort by column heading (This Week Gross, Average Ticket, etc.), and be as selective as you wish.

You may consider, for example, extracting the top five grossing shows and averaging those each week.

Very quickly, it appears that current (now!) prices average about $70, while 1984 prices averaged close to $30. [Musicals, maybe a bit higher: 42nd St and ACL $31; Cats and SITPWG $38]


p.s. Some of the math is missing from the older data, so you may need to do your own division of Gross / Seats Sold to get Average Ticket.


pps: You can combine any group of shows yourself: plays, musicals, large theaters, small venues, etc.

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 5/1/08 at 5:52pm

The rise has been much more than the rate of inflation .

[rayoflight104]

Posted: 5/1/08 at 7:03pm

Thanks for the info.

Are there any shows right now that aren't offering any kind of discount to ticket prices? Broadway and Off-Broadway productions (all types)
Or do all shows in some way offer a discount?