Broadway Defies the Odds With Another Record-Breaking Season

The TKTS booth in Times Square. Credit Yana Paskova for The New York Times

“Hamilton” brought a boost. “The Lion King” provided ballast. And Broadway, once again, broke a record: The theater season that just ended attracted more people, and more money, than any before.

Broadway seems to be defying the cultural odds: An ancient art form in the digital age, it is strengthening thanks to an ever-increasing influx of tourists and a resurgent enthusiasm for musical theater.

The season that ended on Sunday included 13,317,980 visitors to Broadway shows — a record number, up 1.6 percent over the previous season, according to figures released on Monday by the Broadway League. Theaters grossed $1.373 billion, also a record, up 0.6 percent over the previous season, although the grosses are not adjusted for inflation.

Once again, Simba ruled supreme: “The Lion King,” still mighty more than 18 years after it opened, grossed $102.7 million on Broadway last season, far outpacing any other show. The musical, which has multiple productions running simultaneously around the globe, has grossed more than $6.2 billion worldwide, and has been seen by 85 million people over its history, according to Disney; by contrast, 478,605 people have seen the Broadway production of “Hamilton” thus far.

“Hamilton” (featuring a onetime Simba, Christopher Jackson, in the role of George Washington) offered an enormous jolt of energy to the Broadway season. This hip-hop musical about America’s founding fathers has dominated the cultural conversation, raked in awards and been celebrated at the White House. Many Broadway leaders believe the show has helped the industry as a whole, bringing attention from corners of the culture that have long preferred to mock jazz hands and dream ballets.

Case in point: Jeremy St. Louis, a 44-year-old sports anchor for the station beIN in Miami, who had never been to Broadway before seeing “Hamilton” last week.

“I detest musicals, but I was in town on business, and had the opportunity to get some tickets, and heard it’s such a great play that I couldn’t miss it,” he said on Monday. “Now we’re planning to go back to New York later this year, and we’re going to try to get tickets to ‘The Lion King’ and maybe something else.”

“Hamilton” is doing unusually well financially — it is the only new musical that is consistently among the top five highest-grossing shows, and it now has the highest average ticket price on Broadway. But because “Hamilton” began performances seven weeks into the season, and is in a midsize (1,321 seats) theater, it was only the fifth-highest grossing show, bringing in $74 million, behind not only “The Lion King,” but also “Wicked,” “Aladdin,” and “The Book of Mormon.”

Among plays, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” was, by far, the highest grosser, pulling in $32.9 million. “Curious Incident,” which last year won the Tony Award for best new play, is a rarity for modern Broadway — a long-running play — and is planning to close Labor Day weekend after 823 performances.

Two poorly reviewed star vehicles were the next-highest-grossing plays: “China Doll,” with Al Pacino ($12.6 million), and “Misery,” with Bruce Willis ($12.5 million); plays without stars did much less well. Of the $1.373 billion grossed on Broadway last season, 13 percent went to plays.

“I continue to be really worried about the plays,” said Victoria Bailey, executive director of Theater Development Fund, the organization that runs the TKTS booths. “When people are going to the theater, either as a tourist or for a celebratory event, they tend to go to musicals, and so I think it’s even harder for plays to make a go of it. In the short run, we’re holding even, but what is five years from now going to look like?”

Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, attributed the industry’s continued growth to tourism (about 67 percent of the Broadway audience comes from beyond New York City and its suburbs) and to the mix of offerings during a season of unusually diverse programming.

Tourism has grown in New York for six years in a row — this year there are expected to be 59.7 million visitors to the city, according to Fred Dixon, the president of NYC & Company, the city’s official tourism agency. Although Broadway’s growth rate this past season was lower than it had been the previous season, Ms. St. Martin said she was pleased.

“We have more million-dollar-a-week shows, and more shows with strong attendance, than we used to,” she said. “We’ve become a much bigger part of pop culture, with ‘Glee’ and ‘Smash’ and live television shows like ‘The Sound of Music’ and ‘The Wiz,’ and more people are aware that Broadway isn’t just something for the 1-percenter.”

Nonetheless, there are reasons for concern. For the first time since the Broadway League began releasing records, the average ticket price actually declined, albeit only slightly, to $103.11, from $104.18. That might be good news for consumers, many of whom complain about the high cost of tickets to shows at the 40 large theaters in and around Times Square that make up Broadway, but it is worrisome for producers, whose costs for mounting and marketing shows seem to grow ever larger.

There are other indicators that the industry’s success is enjoyed by a relative few. Including long-running hits, short-lived holdovers from the previous season, and new shows, there were 72 productions on Broadway last season — 41 musicals, 28 plays, two magic shows and one dance spectacle. About half of all the grosses were earned by just 10 of those productions. And, as is true every season, a vast majority of new productions flopped.

“The Broadway economy is mirroring the U.S. economy, with the rich getting richer and the poor struggling,” said Ken Davenport, a producer who produced a Deaf West Theater revival of “Spring Awakening” on Broadway last season. “The air is being sucked out of the room by big hits, and people are no longer seeking to discover new things, but are going to monster brands that they know and are comfortable with.”

Mitchell Ross, 22, from Blairsville, Pa., had just graduated from college when he visited New York last week. He had seen many of the big sights on previous trips, so he decided for the first time to see a Broadway show, and chose one that he knew from the movies: “Les Misérables.”

“When you hear Broadway, you expect a good quality show, but it really was phenomenal — so much talent in acting and singing,” he said. “The next time I’m back, I’d like to see more. ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ and ‘Phantom of the Opera’ are on my list.”

Broadway is bracing for a tough season ahead: The quadrennial confluence of the Summer Olympics and the presidential election is often bad news for theaters, because, hard as it is to believe, some people prioritize politics or sports over theatergoing.

Also, unlike this season, when the much-anticipated “Hamilton” seemed to be a guaranteed hit even before it opened, next season does not yet have anything quite so surefire.

A revival of “Hello, Dolly!”, starring Bette Midler and David Hyde Pierce, seems to be the most likely hit, but it isn’t opening until the final days of the new season; “The SpongeBob Musical” has the potential to be big, given the popularity of the animated series on which it is based, but that show still needs to prove itself to audiences in Chicago before booking a transfer.