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PeterRS

How Much Would You Pay For Musicals and Plays?

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Visiting a Broadway show has been a part of many tourists' experience when visiting the Big Apple. The most expensive ticket used to be for a popular opera at the Metropolitan Opera House. Comparisons now are quite difficult as many opera tickets are booked up to a year ahead. Looking at the website today, there are tickets for productions like Carmen or Don Giovanni at the end of this month where the best available seats are less than $100. Naturally they are about the worst seats in the House as the best would probably have been around $350 if purchased in late 2024.

Popular musicals have been another high ticket purchase. I have seen many in my time since I was 17 and can only once recall paying more than $100. It was $150 for Wicked, a popular musical I thought I would like - but I walked out at the interval. The whole pricing of musials had changed when the best producer of the last quarter of 2024, Sir Cameron Mackintosh, decided to up the top price when he brought his London production of Miss Saigon to Broadway in 1991. Even with musicals like CATS, Phantom of the Opera and Mackintosh's own Les Miserables still playing, he charged the highest Broadway price ever with 200 seats for Miss Saigon priced at $99. The theatre world gasped. If Andrew Lloyd Webber had been able to charge that price, he and his investors would not have lost the $20 million in the later run of Sunset Boulevard (the amount estimated by New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich).

But Miss Saigon merely opened the pricing doors. Producers finally realised that instead of fixed price seating over all performances, aggressive dynamic pricing to fit demand could make a huge difference between profit and a large loss. When it opened in 2001, Mel Brooks The Producers kept that $99 top price. But his producers were mightily pissed off when it garnered amazing reviews and hotel concierges were charging their hotel guests much more for the privilege of finding tickets. So later in the year, 50 seats were set aside at a price of $480. Other producers cashed in. When Hamilton opened, for a time it had a block of tickets priced at $1,595. All sold out.

Not all new shows succeed, though, one being Spiderman: Turn Off The Lights the musical with the renowned theatre director Julie Taymor who had directed the  massively successful The Lion King. If anyone plans to write a disaster story of a disastrous musical production, this will be a large part of the book. Its costs were in the $75-95 million range, but it ended up with dreadful reviews and a loss of $60 million.

The new 'fad' on Broadway and to a certain extent London is to have famous movie stars undertake limited runs of plays with ticket prices never even considered before. Most recently George Clooney played Ed Murrow in Good Night And Good Luck on a 13-week run in New York's 1,500 seat Winter Garden Theatre. Plays are massively cheaper to put on than musicals. But the top price was $825 and the show completely sold out, with revenues in the last two weeks of $4 million each. Everyone entitled to royalties were paid handsomely. Sadly theatre stage workers do not share in profits.

So Broadway is now out of the ballpark for many of New York's regular visitors. And it is not only re theatre, nor the USA. Insane pricing has been part and parcel of the pop world for decades. An analysis by the newspaper the Yorkshire Post has proved that between 1996 and 2025 the average live concert ticket in the UK has risen by 521%. In Singapore last year, a VIP ticket for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour would have set you back US$948. No ticket was less than S$100 and this was before ticket agency charges and other costs were aded.

As one who loves theatre, musicals and opera, I think back to my early days in London immediately after finishing university. I got seats at the back of the amphitheatre at the Royal Opera House for around £0.60. A theatre ticket to see a play with two of the country's greatest actors Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson cost around $2. How young people nowadays as well as the mass of tourists can develop an interest in the arts and in live performances beats me.

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