‘Carousel’ Surges, ‘Potter’ Is Cooler As Broadway Box Office Flattens
April 23, 2018
‘Carousel’ Surges, ‘Potter’ Is Cooler As Broadway Box Office Flattens
With less than a month to go in the official Broadway year, total grosses for the week ending April 22 came in at $37,506,237, according to the Broadway League. That’s about $260,000 shy of last week’s tally, meaning essentially flat.
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The total did rise 5% over the same week in 2017, from 36 shows compared with 38 a year ago, but it reflected a somewhat mixed bag of individual show results. Newer entries like Carousel and Mean Girls ticked up, with the former spiking 22% to $1.282 million and the latter rising 6% to $1.469 million. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, while already well-established commercial force of nature, slowed 25% from last week’s heady pace.
Many shows held almost exactly steady week to week, including Angels in America, Frozen and the long-reigning weekly box office champ, Hamilton.
Despite the stagnation, the Broadway community has its cautiously optimistic eye on the year-to-date total. After Week 48 (which ended yesterday), overall receipts stand at a bit better than $1.5 billion — a remarkable 14.6% improvement from 2017 as of this point. Actual attendance, skeptics would be hasty to note, has inched up a far more modest 1.5%, meaning the box office gains are due to a boom in pricing.
Harry Potter, which officially opened on April 22, collected $1.272 million, down 25% from $1.701 million the week before. Backers of the expensive production are hardly fretting, though, considering the nearly unanimous rapture from critics, whose blurbs would make even the hardest-bitten publicist weep.
This week will see several high-profile openings as the Tony window gradually starts to close. Summer: The Donna Summer Musical opens tonight, followed by Travesties on Tuesday, Saint Joan on Wednesday and The Iceman Cometh on Thursday.