Last October, Disney’s “The Lion King” became the first Broadway musical in history to reach a cumulative gross of $1 billion. In December, “Wicked” shattered the all-time weekly box-office record by raking in more than $3 million in ticket sales. And in that same month, “Phantom of the Opera” sold nearly $2 million worth of seats at the Majestic Theatre, where it has been playing since January 9, 1988.
Some of the reasons for these impressive statistics lie in the recent demographics report concerning the 2012-13 season issued by the Broadway League, a national trade association for the theatrical industry. The highlights include the following facts: a whopping 66 percent of tickets were purchased by tourists, 23 percent of which were foreigners; 68 percent of audiences were female; the average age of the attendee is 42.5; Hispanic attendance increased by 2 percent to 8 percent, while African-American participation dropped by an equal amount; and the 18-24 demographic was the highest in the history of the survey, while the share of suburbanite audience dropped to its lowest level ever (17 percent).
What does this say about the state of Broadway? According to Charlotte St. Martin, the executive director of the Broadway League, the report reflects the increasing diversity of what is on offer. “When I first started coming to New York to attend theater, there was the serious play, the comedy, and the big musical, and that was pretty much it,” she said. “Now we have shows for every age demographic and are creating more shows for the diversity of our audience. If your style of musical is not ‘Phantom of the Opera,’ there is ‘Once’ or ‘Book of Mormon.’ I’m fond of saying, ‘The numbers are what the numbers are.’ But I do think they reflect the trends of the past few years.”
With tourism accounting for the long runs and blockbuster box office of such shows as “The Lion King,” there will no doubt be continuing emphasis on splashy musicals that can appeal to theatergoers who may have a limited command of English. A polyglot of languages can be heard during intermission at such shows as “Chicago,” and the international market is a concerted aim of this season’s “After Midnight,” an all-singing, all-dancing 1930s revue largely drawn from the catalog of the legendary Duke Ellington.
The increase in the 18-24 demographic can probably be attributed to the “Mormon” effect as well as Disney’s impact which, in addition to “Lion King,” includes “Newsies” and the forthcoming “Aladdin.” What also cannot be discounted is the impact of such television shows as “Glee” and even the short-lived “Smash,” as well as the success of films like “Les Miserables.” (In fact, a revival of a “Les Miserables” arrives this season to take advantage of the movie’s visibility. The fact that its foreign gross of nearly $300 million doubled its domestic box office augurs well for the Broadway revival.)
St. Martin said that the increase of the youthful demographic is encouraging, since data bears out that “once we get them in, they tend to come back.” Whether that will hold for the Hispanic audience has yet to be seen. She also noted that the addition of 170,000 new Latino theatergoers reflects the increase of tourism from South America, especially Brazil, as well as the League’s own efforts to reach out to the domestic market through such audience-development programs as “Viva Broadway!” Nonetheless, the ethnic diversity can be somewhat reliant on content. The season of “The Color Purple,” which played one of Broadway’s biggest houses, saw a significant rise in the African-American audience at the time. That has since fallen off and even Denzel Washington’s return to Broadway in a revival of “A Raisin in the Sun” may not affect those numbers, since it will be a limited run in a small playhouse.
What has remained somewhat constant in the statistics is the fact that the average Broadway theatergoer is a well-educated, affluent, middle-aged white female who is most influenced in her choices by word-of-mouth and increasingly uses the Internet to make her purchases. While St. Martin does not dispute the profile, she said, “I don’t think that the Broadway theatergoer is as cookie cutter as the report makes it look like.” She cites a study which indicated that the interests of sports fans and Broadway theatergoers converged in a number of ways. Hence the recent participation of national sports organizations in supporting Eric Simonson’s plays “Lombardi,” about legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, and the forthcoming “Bronx Bombers,” about the New York Yankees. “I think women will always make up the majority of our market but I think we’re adding to that market,” St. Martin said.
