With winter causing a slowdown in New York tourism and Bruce Springsteen on hiatus until the end of the month, the Broadway box office continued to deflate last week in the kind of slowdown that often hits in the late January-early February frame.
Almost every single individual production — from “Wicked” ($1,311,395) on down to “The Play That Goes Wrong” ($237,858) — saw numbers dip, though none too dramatically. Bucking the trend: “Waitress” ($1,433,902), stepping up by a quarter of a million dollars in that last week that pop musician Jason Mraz overlaps in the cast with Sara Bareilles, the show’s co-creator and current headliner. “Hamilton” ($3,062,978) stepped back up above the $3 million mark, while “The Lion King” ($1,724,602), “Come From Away” ($1,141,413) and “The Book of Mormon” ($1,137,318) also managed to top themselves compared to the previous week.
With “Springsteen on Broadway” — and the approximately $2.4 million it brings in every week — on hiatus, overall sales dipped by $2.8 million to $22 million for 24 shows. Attendance slipped by about 20,000 to 191,186, or 83% of the street’s overall capacity. Those numbers were better than the same week last year (when there were 23 shows playing), with attendance up about 15,000 compared to 2017.
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Things should pick up this week, with Valentine’s Day often bringing in date-night business and the long weekend of President’s Day also encouraging theaters to take in a show.
