Only yesterday I was reporting here on how Broadway has been bucking the credit crunch blues, recording the highest-ever gross take of nearly $1b in the season just ended. But that’s a financial gain, not an audience attendance one, which had actually dropped over the previous twelve months, and that year had been impacted by the Broadway stagehands strike of the autumn of 2007, so was down on where it should have been as it is).
As a correspondent replied to the blog yesterday, the financial gains have been achieved partly by the new notion of variable pricing on Broadway that has made it a free-for-all, though far from free, in which the producers of sought-after shows make even more money from increasing the number of “premium” tickets they sell accordingly; there is no longer an industry-wide top price for plays and musicals, but a sense that producers now will entirely charge what they feel the market will bear.
But shift the focus to the West End, and the good news appears to be holding firm, at least through mid-May according to figures I got from SOLT last week.
Though SOLT do not issue figures for individual productions, unlike on Broadway where the Broadway League releases the weekly takes for its members to be published in Variety and online, they compile weekly attendance records, published by category - musicals, plays and “other”, the latter referring to entertainments, performance pieces, dance and opera. And though attendance figures for the first quarter of 2009, that April 4, registered an overall downturn of 5%, in the first six weeks of the second quarter that ended May 16, figures have gone in the other direction, and were so far up 3% on the same quarter in the previous year.
Interestingly, though the musicals were marginally down - by 3% over those six weeks to date - plays had increased attendances significantly, by some 29% — with one week, w/c May 3, showing a remarkable 75% gain on the previous year. The Donmar Warehouse’s Wyndham’s season must be part of the reason, but so is Waiting for Godot, War Horse and Calendar Girls. And, going forward from mid-May to now, those figures could only continue to grow: last week saw the arrival of a highly-acclaimed new production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, while today sees the opening of the double-bill of the inaugural productions in Sam Mendes’ Bridge Project, The Winter’s Tale and The Cherry Orchard at the Old Vic.
No wonder that Charles Spencer was able to write in the Daily Telegraph last Friday, “I can’t remember ever being as busy as I have in the past five months. January is usually quiet. Not this year, it wasn’t. There was a new show to see almost every night. More recently, it has become busier still, meaning that I have to fit in shows on Bank Holidays or Saturday matinees. When I started as The Daily Telegraph’s theatre critic almost 20 years ago, I was never out more than four nights a week, sometimes only three. These days, it is almost always five and sometimes six. I don’t grumble. It’s work I love.”
I don’t try to grumble, either - except over things I miss. My increasingly familiar refrain is to simply remind myself, “I can’t see everything”. And yet, and yet… On Sunday night I was at Pizza on the Park to see one of my favourite singers, Alison Jiear, make her debut there, and wouldn’t have missed it for the world (You can read my review here). But it meant that I wasn’t at the National for the Pinter celebration, and as Michael Coveney’s review in today’s Independent declares, it was “a unique occasion which did something none of the fulsome obituaries quite managed: it reminded you how much actors love performing his stuff, what wonderful material he gave them, and how his work defined, to a very great extent, the acting styles of the last century.” He cites performances from Colin Firth, Eileen Atkins, Sheila Hancock, Jude Law, Indira Varma, Michael Sheen, Janie Dee, Gina McKee, Alan Rickman, Lindsay Duncan, Douglas Hodge, Samuel West, Kenneth Cranham, Jeremy Irons and others that I now wish I had seen.
And it wasn’t just about who was onstage; my friend Billy who went told me yesterday, “It was quite wonderful and I felt like I was at a very tony Tonys’ — everyone was there it seems except Judi Dench, Simon Callow and Stephen Daldry (and of course you!)”.
The crunch on critical time sometimes feels more severe than the crunch on the rest of our dimes (and pence). We are constantly being forced to make choices: last night, for instance, Shakespeare’s Globe went head-to-head, opening a robustly well-cast production of As You like It (that was just as I liked it) simultaneously with Kursk at the Young Vic. I opted for the former; but after reading Billington today, I am now re-arranging my diary to squeeze it in next week.
In fact staying on top of my diary is becoming the hardest task of all nowadays. Sometimes you have to squeeze in real life, too - today’s blog is posted far later than usual because I had to visit the dental hygienist - but I’m also trying to keep you ahead of yours. My friend Billy tells me that unless I blog about Pizza on the Park, for instance, he simply doesn’t know about it: somehow they are failing to get the message out that it is open for business. (And although Alison Jiear’s show was busy enough, the previous week’s Sophie Louise Dann drew an audience of just three people one night, our waitress told us on Sunday, and they were only there by accident: they had actually booked to see Andrea Marcovicci whose engagement was cancelled).
I am also pleased to note that my “tweeting” (the latest entries from which usefully appear alongside this blog here, but can also be found here are also serving a useful purpose: both Billy and another friend Philip reported that it was seeing my tweet that booking had opened for the new Donmar season yesterday that prompted them to go online to book. Interestingly, the system crashed for both of them; but they succeeded in the end.
Glad you mentioned "Premium Seats" Where did the idea for these spring from? Aren’t producers greedy enough without charging up to 50% premium on what used to be normally available seating? This and other practices makes my blood boil.