The Star's Away--and So Is a Lot of the Audience

Nathan Lane took a vacation from the run of The Addams Family last week, August 24-29.  I found out when I looked at the weekly grosses on Playbill.com.  The Addams Family grossed $764,231 last week but the week before that, it had grossed $1,125,749.  That's a drop of $361,518.  Lane should renegotiate his contract!

And I confirmed that Lane's vacation was the cause of the drop.  It's announced on the Addams Family Blog.

The show took the hit on total ticket sales and the average price of the ticket sold.  Percent of house dropped from 85.7 percent to 70.8 percent.  Average ticket price dropped from $115.16 to $88.84.

We've noted the value of stars on Broadway elsewhere in this blog.  Theater lovers may bemoan the increase in star casting in limited-run productions, but Broadway is only following its first precept: It's all about the money!

Update October 5

The impact of stars is felt in the adding of them to a show as well as the taking away.  When the frontman Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, the rock band whose songs are used in Broadway musical American Idiot, joined the musical in the part of St. Jimmy for a week, box office grew to $1,092,334.  The week before the gross was a mere $480,566.  The producers might want Armstrong to return but it won't happen soon.  He's on tour with Green Day, according to Playbill.com. They're playing October dates in Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru.

If You Read Nothing Else about the NFP Theater, Read "Theatre Facts 2009"

Theatre Communications Group has just released their annual survey, Theatre Facts 2009.  If you care about the regional theater in the US, you should peruse this valuable resource.  From the press release:

Theatre Facts 2009 reports that the economic crisis had a negative impact on the not-for-profit theatre field, just as it did on nearly every sector of society. For most theatres, the economy’s effect on their bottom line was dramatic, with the majority of theatres ending the year in the red, largely driven by pervasive losses on endowments and other investments....“The financial performance of the theatre industry generally tracks with the state of the economy overall, and theatres were by and large weakened by the most recent recession,” said Teresa Eyring, executive director of Theatre Communications Group.

Kennedy Center's President and author of The Art of the Turnaround: Creating and Maintaining Healthy Arts Organizations, Michael Kaiser was quoted this week in the Washington Post, referring to his experiences traveling the country to lead seminars on how NFP performing arts groups might respond to the recession:

Maybe four people out of 11,000 said they were close to closing the doors. Many more said they were cutting and they were fearful and didn't know which risks to take.

 This is not news per se.  It remains important to know and act.