Hurricane fallout puts damper on Broadway box office

As expected, Broadway musicals and plays grossed only $11.6 million last week, a sharp drop from overall tickets sales of $20.1 million during the previous week. This being the result of New York City’s shutdown over Hurricane Irene, which led to the cancellation of typically profitable performances on Saturday and Sunday. Nearly 131,000 people saw Broadway shows before theaters went dark for the storm, compared to about 218,000 the week before.

The box office data, released yesterday afternoon by theater owners and producers through their trade association, the Broadway League, were the best measures of the economic consequences of Irene on the nation’s unofficial theater capital.

All 23 musicals and plays on Broadway were closed after New York officials announced that the city subway and other mass transit would stop running on Saturday. The storm, while severe in swaths of the suburbs and some sections of the city, ended up packing a weaker wallop in the theater district, where skies had begun to brighten by the usual time of Sunday matinees.

As another point of comparison with last week’s $11.6 million haul, Broadway shows grossed $18.1 million during the same playing week last summer. If last weekend’s performances had not been canceled, productions probably would have grossed in the range of $20 million, based on the number of shows now running and seasonal and year-to-year trends. The productions offered ticket refunds or exchanges for other performances.

The financial data offered a rare opportunity to assess the box office strength of Broadway shows excluding Saturday and Sunday performances. That said, the strongest-selling productions during weeknights last week were the usual top-grossing shows: The Lion King, Wicked, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and The Book of Mormon. The weakest: Master Class [Ed. note: which I'm dying to see!], Rock of Ages, Baby It’s You, and Hair.

(Via ArtsBeat)