Fun Home ended its 18-month Broadway run last week. In the months following its Best Musical Tony win in 2015, the show was a solid attraction, regularly selling out at the Circle in the Square. Its performance during 2016 has been less boffo, but still fairly strong. For its final week, the musical enjoyed a modest bump in sales. Monies rose $72,729—the biggest climb of the week—resulting in a box office take of $521,567. That represented 65 percent of the possible gross and resulted in 93 percent capacity houses.
Several of the big musicals along Broadway suffered six-figure drops at the box office, perhaps affected by the tail end of the Labor Day holiday weekend. Waitress fell by $133,383, The Lion King dropped $154,661, Something Rotten! slipped by $109,060, Matilda descended $135,186 and Aladdin plummeted $194,987. Taking the biggest hit was School of Rock, whose box office take was $305,131 less than the week previous.
These tumbles all led the overall Broadway box office to fall from $23,361,025 to $20,154,528, a drop of more than $3 million.
Jersey Boys, which announced last week that it would close out its long run, saw a slight leap at the box office of $55,030. There’s still room for improvement at the August Wilson Theatre, however. Only 69 percent of the seats were sold last week.
Holiday Inn, the new holiday-oriented attraction at Studio 54, put in its first full week of previews last week. Its showing remained underwhelming, with only 32 percent of the gross brought in and 59 percent of the seats filled. It may still be too early in the fall to gauge public interest in the yuletide staging.
Hamilton is such a smash that, in terms of box office, it has only great weeks and really great weeks. Last week was one of the really great ones. Collections went up by $58,438, a notable amount given how little head room there is, box-office wise, for this always-sold-out show. That nudged the total box-office take well over the $2 million mark—$2,150,229, to be precise.
The average ticket price, meanwhile, was just three pennies below $200—a figure the musical hasn’t approached since star Lin-Manuel Miranda left the cast in early July. This may be a harbinger of a particularly strong autumn for the multiple Tony-winner.
