Broadway's locus communis says musicals are easier to sell than plays. Given the Rialto's tourist-heavy audience, 15% of whom are international, a tuneful spectacle can reach more pockets than yet another Arthur Miller revival. One need not speak English to hum along, after all.
For the most part, this adage holds up. Hamilton is the industry's highest-grossing show three years running, with The Lion King and Wicked jostling for 2nd and 3rd place. Other heavy hitters include Dear Evan Hansen, The Book of Mormon, and Aladdin.
But 2019 is shaping up differently. Several plays are breaking records and performing far more like megamusicals than traditional board-treaders.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is the most predictable of the hits. The epic two-parter likely didn't need six Tonys to set the all-time box office record for a play, with $2.5 million in a single week. It's outgrossed every show in 2019 so far with the exception of Hamilton - and that's with 300 seats every performance sold for $40 a pop.
Network is also playing to sold out crowds, albeit in a much smaller house. With just 1,016 seats to fill every night, it's barely half the size of Potter's nest, but selling well enough to quickly recoup its $7 million capitalization, paving the way for star Bryan Cranston to earn $1 million by the end of its run.
To Kill A Mockingbird is the season's other box office smash, and it has an extra feather in its cap: the show seems impervious to Broadway's traditional winter doldrums. Every January, grosses plummet across the industry as holiday crowds disappear and prices deflate. Potter grossed $500,000 less this week than at Christmas, and Network was down $300,000.
But Mockingbird is still performing essentially at holiday heights. Its total gross this week was just $55,000 below its $1.7 million Christmas record. As far as Atticus & Co. are concerned, they're still caroling over at the Shubert.
Each of these shows is succeeding for different reasons, only one of which can be replicated with any ease. That would be Network, which struck gold using the tried-and true strategy of anchoring a play with a famous screen star. This doesn't always work (see recent duds Hughie, The Present, and M. Butterfly) but the producers of Network have a dynamo in Cranston.
Potter is as much an outlier as Hamilton. Pundits like to point to both as indicators of Broadway's health, but they operate so far outside the norm that they're not actually useful tools for comparison. Hamilton is a once-in-a-generation juggernaut that reasserted Broadway's place in America's national dialogue. Cursed Child is hardly such a revolution, but it is capitalizing on a once-in-a-generation juggernaut that sold enough books to be read by 1/15th of the entire human race.
Mockingbird's alchemy is more complex. It's got a big name writer (The West Wing's Aaron Sorkin) a powerhouse producer (EGOT Scott Rudin) and unimpeachable source material woven into America's cultural fabric. Six decades after its first printing the book still sells a million copies a year, and remains a beloved touchstone for the boomer generation that grew up with it...who happen to now be prime Broadway ticket buyers. The show itself is a fine venture, but it's not singular - that distinction belongs to Harper's Lee's voice, the echo of which is drawing crowds like a siren song.
Regardless of their unique recipes, the three shows share an undeniable metric of success: they all grossed over 100% of their listed potential last week, and have for many weeks prior. The only other show that lays claim to the same? Hamilton.
There is one more play of note right now. The Ferryman is an epic British import, an old-school barnburner covering everything from broad comedy to potent family drama, with nary a whiff of source material about it. While it hasn't quite been pulling the same box office numbers, it's still grossed 81% of its potential since opening, which is right in line with the industry as a whole.
Put another way: it's a completely original play, with a massive cast and zero movie stars - and it's been in the black all winter. For my money it's the best show of the season thus far, and the one I point to when people ask, "Can a new play succeed on Broadway?"
