August began on Broadway with another fairly lackluster performance at the box office. Cumulative collections amounted to $24,062,535, which was down nearly a million-and-a-half from the previous week. With two fewer shows on the boards than before, attendance was also down roughly 15,000 at 225,907. All but a handful of shows experienced slippage at the box office.
The biggest jump of the week for an eight-performance week belonged to to Cats at the Neil Simon Theatre. The new revival, which opened to mixed-to-poor reviews last week, didn’t seem to suffer much for the verdict. The money count was up $327,657, reaching $1,083,009. That represented 76 percent of the possible take. (Wicked’s collections enjoyed a larger boost than Cats, but that musical played a nine-show week.)
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s newer offering, School of Rock, did about as well, raking in 80 percent of the gross and filling 96 percent of the seats at the Winter Garden (Cats’ original home). The composer’s longest-lived show, The Phantom of the Opera, wasn’t as popular, with box office moneys topping off at $961,265, which was 82 percent of the gross. Still, not bad for an old dog.
Another old British mega-musical, Les Misérables, is enjoying a healthy summer with the tourist influx. Ninety-eight percent of the seats were filled last week at the Imperial, a number in keeping with the previous week. Box-office take was 84 percent of the possible, with the show taking in more than $1 million last week.
On Your Feet, the Gloria Estefan bio-musical, continues to have trouble getting ticketbuyers’ feet to walk through the doors of the Marquis. Gross stood at 42 percent, with only 56 percent of the ducats sold. That put the new show among the lowest grossing productions on The Street, including An Act of God, An American in Paris, Fiddler on the Roof and Finding Neverland.
In fact, only one show performed to full capacity at the box office last week, that being Hamilton, where the gross was 106 percent of the potential. As the show’s lyric goes, “Man, the man is non-stop.”
