Broadway has record season as ticket revenues double in 10 years

Broadway shows in New York had a record-breaking 2018-2019 season, the theater district said Wednesday, both in attendance and revenues, which have doubled in the last 10 years.

Some 14.7 million people spent $1.82 billion on tickets to see 38 different shows, with revenue up 7.8 percent from the year before. Earnings have nearly doubled in the past decade and more than tripled in the last 20 years.

A statement from The Broadway League notes that the comparison between 2018-2019 and 2017-2018 gets even better when correcting for the fact the 2017-2018 season was 53 weeks instead of 52 – attendance would have been up 9.5 percent and revenues up 10.3 percent.

Despite lacking hits as big as 2015-2016’s Hamilton, 2016-2017’s Dear Evan Hansen or 2017-2018’s The Band’s Visit, several shows, such as Tootsie and The Prom have still done well.

And the much-anticipated adaptation of Harper Lee’s iconic anti-racism novel To Kill a Mockingbird was the breakout of the season. After a jump last year, overall ticket prices remained stable, with an average cost of $123.87, a 0.6 percent increase.

But this stability masks a strong disparity between the price of tickets for musicals, which were down by 2.3 percent, and the price of tickets for plays, which saw a sharp rise of 30 percent.

That was partly due to the effect of tickets for To Kill a Mockingbird, which in some cases sold for as much as $499.