Strong winter for Broadway

The Phantom in the Opera hit 10,000 performances on Feb. 11. Chandra Lee Schwartz and Jackie Burns in Wicked within the Gershwin.Winter, remarkably, remains kind to Broadway this year. Sure, last week's box office amounts might possibly not have given legiters much to acquire searching toward, but also for a mid-February frame, it was not so bad. And calculating right from the start in the twelve several weeks, the current annum is well before 2011 both if this involves sales and attendance. According to amounts develop with the Broadway League, this year's B.O. cume hit $112.3 million versus. the $87.6 000 0000 drenched for a similar days this season. Attendance showed up at 1.3 million, in contrast for the millions of theatergoers who switched out throughout the identical window a year ago. Numerous factors lead for the uptick, most notoriously from the greater volume of productions running this year than inside the same six days this season. You'll find also Street-wide marketing deals, beneath the ads Broadway Week (which ended Feb. 4) and Kids' Evening on Broadway (Feb. 5-9), aiding to warm-up winter biz, and additionally, the unseasonably warm winter hasn't created only one blizzard to discourage auds. Each week when some shows were up while others were lower -- with no fluctuations were attention-getting -- the finest news in the frame was most likely the ten,000th performance of "The Phantom of Opera" ($604,378) on Feb. 11. The week's tally was lower just a little within the prior sesh due to the fact half the inventory only at that landmark perf on Saturday was led to have an Stars Fund charitable organization event. Also lower was "Porgy and Bess" ($818,346), in the dip possibly because of some-show insufficient above-the-title thesp Norm Lewis. A much more worrying decline was released at "Sister Act" ($426,152), which saw attendance slide below 48%, additionally to at soon-to-close play "Stick Fly" ($196,337), another demonstrate that carried out to under half of capacity. Among people verifying gains inside the prior week was "Wicked" ($1,508,501), which reclaimed the most effective perfect the charts before last week's leader, "It of Mormon." The 2nd, however, still did okay, breaking another house record within the O'Neill Theater getting an every week tally of $1,485,740. "Spider-Guy: Turn in the Dark:" ($1,378,970) and "The Lion King" ($1,349,837) rounded the frame's millionaires' club. Among the other productions to find out a sales bump were individuals most likely to own be a lift within the Kids' Evening campaign, including kid-friendly "Mary Poppins" ($667,272) and "How you can achieve Business Without Really Trying" ($656,165), whose star, Nick Jonas, was promoted since the Kids' Evening ambassador. Overall sales rose about $600,000 to $15.6 000 0000. That's greater in comparison to $15.millions of released throughout the identical frame a year ago, but last week's attendance of 177,602 would be a little underneath the 179,000 from 2011. Joining the fray the other day was the commercial alternation in last fall's nonprofit staging of "Venus in Fur" ($346,117), verifying solid amounts for just about any play that's technically still in previews before a Feb. 29 re-opening. Contact Gordon Cox at gordon.cox@variety.com