While the ongoing Broadway strike is affecting business in the here and now – with losses mounting daily, tonight’s opening of The Farnsworth Invention likely to be indefinitely postponed and unless a sudden resolution occurs, the same thing to follow tomorrow for Broadway import of the National’s The Seafarer – the bottom has fallen out of the bottom line on Broadway at the place where it counts: the box office. And if and when it finally is resolved – and the New York Times today reports, “from the way things look, it could be a long run” – there’ll be another potentially lethal obstacle for producers to face: the lack of an advance sale. As the strike becomes ever more protracted and uncertainty prevails over when shows will resume, consumers will not be banking their money with box offices anytime soon for future performances that may not happen.
Getting money upfront has always been the holy grail of theatre producers (who are of course comforted by knowing how many people will be coming through the door and the fact that it allows them to plan for the future), and loved by theatre owners (who typically bank the money and start earning interest on that revenue without having to pay the producers back until the performance date). But there has been a slow erosion of the advance sale on both sides of the Atlantic, where consumers have now been trained, except for the hottest shows, to hold off from booking until the last minute as they wait for discount deals to materialise. In fact Broadway has, in the last few years, countered this by offering the deals upfront, with extensive discounts for early bookers to get them through the door at the beginning of the runs now.
But the Broadway strike will undermine consumer confidence once again at a time when there were a lot of new shows heading into town, many of which would have been promoting themselves with deals like that. So that marketing spend will have been wasted. The strongest shows will survive – people will want to see Wicked whenever they finally happen – but the newer shows and some of the weaker hold-overs will be in serious trouble now.
In London, a lower cost-base to cover weekly running expenses means that big advances aren’t quite as necessary. But if you can get ‘em, bank ‘em, seems to the philosophy. Yesterday Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat announced that it was putting another 200,000 tickets on sale from next Monday for a new 19-week booking period to carry the show to October 18, 2008. The press release suggests, too, that the current price levels – top price of £45 on weekdays, £49.50 on weekends – are being maintained, too, for the new period.
But visiting Dirty Dancing’s website, I discover that tickets there are already on sale to April 11, 2009 – with incremental advances on the ticket prices as the months go on. The current £59.50 top goes up to £60 in March 2008, then £62.50 for weekend performances from October. Intriguingly, however, the bottom price changes, too – and instead of going up, it goes down. The current bottom price of £27.50, which is marked as having a restricted view, goes down to £15. Even as the prices are incrementally increasing, that at least sounds like a step in the right direction.
