Broadway is luring the star-struck to pay big bucks in this final stretch of the season, leading Janice Simpson of Broadway & Me to ask “whether all the hoopla and moola are worth it.” She answers for four of the priciest shows, prefacing her reviews with the stars involved and the top ticket prices for each.
In his blog, Ken Davenport is less concerned with ticket prices than he is with grosses – he’s a producer after all – and calculates how much better they would be if the pandemic had never happened.
Theater bloggers are busy theatergoing in this busiest month of the season, but there is still time to reflect on recent losses in the theater community, both personal and political.
In Star-Struck on Broadway Simpson assesses four of the priciest and starriest new shows on Broadway, finding in only one of them (the last one) fully satisfying ( but you should read her explanations)
Glengarry Glen Ross
The stars: Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk
The ticket price: $799 for the top price at the box office, but $200 average price
Good Night and Good Luck
The star: George Clooney
The ticket price: $775 for the top price at the box office, but $299 average price
Othello
The stars: Denzel Washington, Jake Gyllenhaal
The ticket price: $897 for the top price at the box office, but $379 average price
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The star: Sarah Snook
The ticket price: $497 for the top price at the box office, but $170 average price.
As if in reply, Ken Davenport points out in his blog that the average price on Broadway overall is $127.61 “which is only 3.02% higher than the 2018-19 average ticket price of $123.87. (So yes, those big star-driven shows may have big ticket prices, but ALL of Broadway isn’t seeing some massive price increase. In fact, the average ticket price is behind inflation.)”
But the bulk of his post is not about prices. If the pandemic hadn’t happened, Broadway would be grossing almost a billion dollars more this year, Davenport calculates. But it did happen, and he estimates it will take another five years for Broadway to get “to where it should be.”
In his prolific Substack “Another Eye Opens,” Don Shewey recalls the playwright Athol Fugard (1932 – 2025), reprinting his reviews of some of the playwright’s well, eye-opening plays. “Fugard stood among the artists – not a huge number – who represented the moral conscience of the 20th century. His work unflinchingly depicted the brutalities of the apartheid regime in South Africa, and his plays demanded scrupulous attention from the audience and from the actors to the human bodies of his characters.”
Shewey’s latest posts skew more politics than theater. He quotes the last paragraph in an essay by M. Gessen entitled “The Hidden Motive Behind Trump’s Attacks on Trans People,”: that questions the normal arguments for why people should stand up for the rights of others, or their own rights will be next: “It is undoubtedly true that the Trump administration won’t stop at denationalizing trans people, but it is also true that a majority of Americans are safe from these kinds of attacks, just as a majority of Germans were. The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.”
Shewey attended the #HandsOff rally in Washington D.C. where he saw many a colorful poster, and overheard protesters quoting Ruth Bader Ginsberg: “: “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.”
In Onstage Blog, Chris Peterson writes about “What William Finn meant to me”
Falsettos hit me like a lightning bolt. I remember listening to it and thinking, “Wait… You’re allowed to write this honestly? With this much feeling and this much wit?”.A New Brain somehow made brain surgery… musical? But also spiritual. Sacred. Hilarious. Terrifying.And Spelling Bee—that show is a masterclass in capturing people on the brink. Not kids, not yet adults. …I never met him, but I felt like I knew him
Peterson also offers a lyrical “Love Letter to Opening Night”
Which feels like a companion piece to his more practical “Should Theatre Influencers Be Posting Reviews of Shows Still in Previews?” And to my more cynical “What is Broadway Opening Night? How it’s changed, why it matters.”
