Keeping the heat in the kitchen….

Broadway lives on a much tighter economic leash than we do in London: not only are costs (and potential rewards) far higher there than here, but also perceptions of what’s hot, and what’s not, change fast. When Spamalot first opened in New York last spring, it became the latest hottest ticket; but now there are signs apparently that interest is already deflating.

According to Broadway’s most influential theatrical insider, the New York Post’s Michael Reidel, Spamalot has seen its advance drop already from over $30m in the summer to $20m now. Of course, a sell out is still a sell out: unlike other manufacturing industries where you just roll out extra stock to meet the demand, with theatre there’s always a finite inventory to sell. And Spamalot, which played to 101.7% capacity last week, is still selling out on a day-to-day basis. But Wicked – now in its third year – is carrying an advance of almost $35m, Reidel reports today, and according to the weekly figures released by the League of American Theatres and Producers, is also playing to 100% capacity. Since the Gershwin (home of WIcked) is larger than the Shubert where Spamalot is playing, its income is far bigger on those stats, too: a capacity week at Wicked has earned over $1,350,000, whereas Spamalot registers nearly £1,088,000.

There’s a fine balancing line between supply and demand on Broadway, and one way to fuel demand is to limit supply by only releasing tickets for short booking periods at a time. “The harder it is to score a seat, the louder the public clamour to get in,” suggests Reidel. But Reidel posits that maybe the Spamalot producers under-supplied and it back-fired: he quotes a veteran Broadway producer saying, “sometimes what happens is people get tired of hearing good seats aren’t available, and they move on to other shows.”

And Reidel concludes that Spamalot should take a leaf out of Cameron Mackintosh’s book, who spent vast sums of money advertising his shows “even when they were sold out”. Reidel goes on, “He believed it was important to ‘brand’ a show while it was hot so that it became part of the landscape. The Phantom mask, Cats eyes and Les Miz waif became ubiquitous. To get its advance back up to blockbuster territory, Spamalot may have to start plastering that Holy Grail all over a lot more billboards around town.”