Broadway Grosses Analysis: The Piano Lesson Plays Final Week as Broadway's Top-Grossing Play | Playbill

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Grosses Broadway Grosses Analysis: The Piano Lesson Plays Final Week as Broadway's Top-Grossing Play

The Phantom of the Opera and Funny Girl have become Broadway's highest-grossing shows.

Broadway continued trudging through the January slump last week, with overall grosses dropping slightly from $25.8 million to $25.7 million. Attendance actually went up, however, with 206,578 people seeing one of the 23 Broadway shows running last week.

The Piano Lesson turned out to be one of the week's winners. The August Wilson revival played its final performance at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre January 29, and the production went out with the top gross of its entire run: $1.26 million. The sum made it the highest-grossing play on Broadway last week, beating out that title's most frequent holder, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, by nearly $90,000.

With regular top grosser The Music Man out of the way (the starry revival closed earlier this month), The Phantom of the Opera and Funny Girl have emerged as Broadway's best performing shows—no January slump to be found at the Majestic or the August Wilson. Phantom, which celebrated its 35th anniversary this week and is looking ahead to the close of its historic run in April, brought in $2.48 million, its highest non-holiday take in recent memory. Funny Girl got dangerously close to joining The $2 Million Club last week, earning $1.87 million at the box office.

Ticket price remains the biggest predictor of box-office success, with the list of most-attended shows continuing to look strikingly different than the highest grossing. The former list was led by usual top performer Wicked, with 14,201 theatregoers catching a performance at the Gershwin last week. The Stephen Schwartz musical came in sixth in terms of grosses. AladdinThe Phantom of the OperaThe Lion King, and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child filled out the rest of the top five for attendance, compared to ranking 10th, 1st, 4th, and 9th (respectively) for their box office.

Take a look at the full report here.

The $1 Million Club (Shows that earned $1 million or more at the box office):

  • The Phantom of the Opera ($2.5 million)
  • Funny Girl
  • Hamilton
  • The Lion King
  • MJ The Musical
  • Wicked
  • Moulin Rouge! The Musical
  • The Piano Lesson
  • Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
  • Aladdin
  • A Beautiful Noise, The Neil Diamond Musical
  • & Juliet
  • SIX: The Musical

(13 of 23 currently running productions)


The 90s Club
(Shows that played to 90% or higher of their seats filled over the entire week):

  • Hamilton
  • The Phantom of the Opera
  • MJ The Musical
  • The Piano Lesson
  • Moulin Rouge! The Musical
  • Hadestown
  • Wicked
  • Chicago
  • & Juliet
  • The Book of Mormon
  • Pictures From Home
  • SIX: The Musical
  • Kimberly Akimbo
  • Aladdin
  • Funny Girl
  • The Lion King
  • Between Riverside and Crazy
  • Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
  • A Beautiful Noise, The Neil Diamond Musical

(19 of 23 currently running productions)

 
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