Broadway Show Ticket Sales Analysis w/e 9/20/2015

This Week’s Notable Movements on Broadway are:

Two New Shows: “Old Times” and “Fool For Love”

In the week ending September 20, 2015, two new shows began previews. On September 15, 2015, Fool For Love played its first preview at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. A Manhattan Theatre Club Production, this play by Sam Shepard is directed by Daniel Aukin, and stars Nina Arianda and Sam Rockwell. In its first week of six previews, it brought in $177,278, which represents 35.77% of its gross potential. The average paid admission was $56.19, and the average audience capacity throughout the partial week was 82.3%. This is a moderate but not great start for this small-scale play, which is enjoying its first production on Broadway despite being a New York revival.

Harold Pinter’s Old Times played its first partial week of previews on Broadway at the American Airlines Theatre. Beginning September 17, 2015, Old Times was off to a pretty good start, in a production directed by Douglas Hodge and starring Clive Owen in his Broadway debut, along with Kelly Reilly and Eve Best. In its first partial week of five performances, Old Times brought in $233,302, which represents 59.28% of its gross potential. The average paid admission was $73.48, and the average audience capacity was 85.8% across the five performances. Therefore, Old Times performed a bit better than Fool For Love in their first partial week of performances, although both have a long way to go before their box office fate is determined.

Overall a Positive Week on Broadway

This past week demonstrated an increased interest in Broadway overall, as the fall season is gearing up. Of the 24 shows that were running this past week, 22 demonstrated an increase in ticket sales. Overall, the industry saw a collective box office increase of $1,849,515. The only two shows that saw a decrease in ticket sales are both high performing shows. Hamilton, which has been breaking records, brought in an excellent weekly gross of $1,545,346, representing 115.76% of its gross potential; however, that was still a slight decrease of $16,294 from the week before, which was even more excellent. In addition, the Tony Award winning Best Play of this past year, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, saw a decrease in ticket sales of $36,577, bringing its weekly gross to $732,079, which represents 78.16% of its gross potential.

The audience capacity was quite good at an average of 94.9% across the eight performances. In addition to the two shows that began performances, six figure increases were seen by Something Rotten!, which went up by $140,956 to reach a weekly gross of $979,968. Neck in neck was An American in Paris, which saw an increase in ticket sales of $140,411, bringing in a weekly gross of $1,373,884. Furthermore, Kinky Boots saw an increase of $122,611, bringing it to a weekly gross of $1,001,377, and The Phantom of the Opera saw an increase of $114,928, bringing in a weekly gross of $959,752. The final six figure increase was seen by The King and I, which went up by $104,229, bringing it to a weekly gross of $1,007,837.

The Following are the Broadway Ticket Sales Numbers for the Week Ending September 20, 2015:

Broadway ticket sales raw data are provided courtesy of The Broadway League All other data, text, opinion, charts and commentary are copyright © 2015 nytix.com