Bright Lights, Broken Dreams
A new study suggests that Broadway success is due to many fickle factors.
“An Empirical Study of Factors Relating to the Success of Broadway Shows” by Jeffrey S. Simonoff and Lan Ma, in The Journal of Business (Jan. 2003), Graduate School of Business, Univ. of Chicago, 1101 E. 58th St., Chicago, Ill. 60637.
The business of Broadway is as dramatic as anything that appears on the stage. In 1999, theatergoers bought more than 11 million tickets to the Great White Way’s dramas, comedies, and musicals, yielding gross revenues of more than $550 million. Yet all too often failure waits in the wings: More than half of the 91 Broadway shows that opened in the three seasons from 1996–97 to 1998–99 closed after 10 or fewer performances. Only six shows, all of them musicals, ran for more than 800 performances: Cabaret, Chicago, Jekyll and Hyde, Ragtime, The Lion King, and Titanic. Such winners can rake in profits of $50,000 per performance, but investors in a loser can see their entire investment—as much as $10 million for a musical—go right down the drain.
The rise of the musical is familiar to anybody who follows theater, but there’s another, less familiar story: the declining clout of the drama critic from The New York Times, that august personage who once held an almost absolute power of life and death on Broadway. After studying three Broadway seasons in the late 1990s, Simonoff, a professor of statistics at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and Ma, a professor at Rider University, in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, found that many of the shows “got poor reviews in the Times but were very successful. [And] several shows getting very positive reviews closed very quickly.” Overall, the authors conclude, reviews in the Times had no impact at all on a show’s longevity.
That contrasts with favorable reviews in the tabloid Daily News, which were statistically associated with “a significantly more successful show,” report Simonoff and Ma. Of course, that may only mean that the Daily News is more in step with popular tastes, not that it is wielding Times-like influence.
Winning major Tony Awards can work wonders at the box office, Simonoff and Ma found. But winning a Tony nomination and then losing the award apparently hurts, as the producers and cast of The Wild Party learned during the 1999–2000 season. Nominated for four major Tony Awards, the musical won none. A week after the awards were announced, the show went dark.