The day after “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” announced that it will close on August 8, just four months after it opened, and two months after it won three Tony Awards, its composer Andrew Lloyd Webber was among the many who weighed in, heavily:
“Broadway is in dire danger of rivaling Hollywood’s empty soundstages with increasingly dark theatres,” he wrote in an extensive, impassioned post on Instagram
Why?
“The truth is that, for any show, it makes practically no financial sense to come to Broadway with things as they are,” he writes. “Would a show like West Side Story, a musical which changed musical theatre forever, have a remote chance to premiere on Broadway today ? With its big cast and orchestra it would break even at well over $1 million weekly before any royalties to creatives. With its sets and costumes the production could easily cost $ 30 million.”
He need not have offered somebody else’s musical as an example. The first Broadway production of “Cats” ran for eighteen years; the first revival for 17 months.
“The news has sparked outcry among cast and company members and across the industry, as the show was well-reviewed and appeared to be healthy on paper, with high attendance and weekly grosses around $1 million,” writes Caitlin Huston in the Hollywood Reporter. “But this could not compete with the high weekly running costs of Broadway musicals, which have been increasing in the past years.”
“Cats: The Jellicle Ball” had some of the best reviews of the year, with critics praising the decision to restage Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” as a ballroom competition pitting drag performers against each other on the runway,” Brent Lang writes in Variety. ” Initially, the show was earning between $900,000 to $1 million a week, a respectable figure. However, sales fell sharply after “The Jellicle Ball” lost the best revival of a musical Tony Award to “Ragtime.””
Although “the production has yet to report attendance of less than 85% at the Broadhurst,” Logan Culwell-Block writes in Playbill, it isn’t like “the new Broadway productions that seem to be most reliably finding success ” — “A-list star-driven straight plays, with many musicals not able to survive long enough to find an audience at ticket prices that allow for profit.”
Lloyd Webber’s full post below
