A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series
[The following omnibus report on the lingering effects of the coronavirus pandemic and shutdown on attendance at public events and venues such as plays, concerts, and museums appeared in the “Arts” section of the New York Times on 13 March 2024. It’s a collection of mini-reports by Times writers who cover the various areas of arts, culture, and entertainment.
[Over the past few months,
I’ve published several articles on Rick
On Theater related to the state and background of the regional theater in
the United States: “A Crisis In America’s Theaters” on 13 September 2023, “The
Regional Theater: Change or Die” on 3 October 2023, and “Regional Theater:
History” on 8 October 2023. In November
and December, I ran an 11-part series on “A History of the National Endowment
for the Arts” because the NEA had a huge influence on the development and
growth of the regional theater in the U.S.
[Because of the seriousness of this subject, I said when I started this coverage that I’d post on it from various perspectives from time to time. Below is my fifth report in that occasional series.]
With shutdowns over, pop concerts crowds are up, but Broadway is still a bit down.
It was four years ago — on March 12, 2020 — that the coronavirus brought the curtain down on Broadway for what was initially supposed to be a monthlong shutdown, but which wound up lasting a year and a half.
The pandemic brought live events and big gatherings to a halt, silencing orchestras, shutting museums and movie theaters and leaving sports teams playing to empty stadiums dotted with cardboard cutouts.
Now, four years later, audiences are coming back, but the recovery has been uneven. Here is a snapshot of where things stand from reporters of The New York Times.
Broadway audiences are still down 17 percent from prepandemic levels.
On Broadway, overall attendance is still down about 17 percent: 9.3 million seats have been filled in the current season as of March 3, down from 11.1 million at the same point in 2020. Box office grosses are down, too: Broadway shows have grossed $1.2 billion so far this season, 14 percent below the level in early March of 2020.
Broadway has always had more flops than successes, and the post-pandemic period has been challenging for producers and investors, especially those involved in new musicals. Three pop productions that have opened since the pandemic — “Six,” about the wives of King Henry VIII, “MJ,” about Michael Jackson and “& Juliet,” which imagines an alternate history for Shakespeare’s tragic heroine — are ongoing hits, but far more musicals have flamed out. The industry is looking with some trepidation toward next month, when a large crop of new shows is set to open.
Many nonprofit theaters around the country are also struggling [see “Theater in America Is Facing a Crisis as Many Stages Go Dark” by Michael Paulson (New York Times, 24 July 2023), posted on ROT in “A Crisis In America’s Theaters”] — attracting fewer subscribers and producing fewer shows — and some have closed. One bright spot has been the touring Broadway market, which has been booming.
Sales for the biggest pop concerts increased by 65 percent.
After a fitful recovery, the pop touring industry has now reached record highs, enabled by superstar tours, pent-up fan demand and ever-higher ticket prices.
The top 100 tours around the world generated $9.2 billion in ticket sales last year — a record by far, according to the trade publication Pollstar, which tracks touring data. That was up an astonishing 65 percent from 2019. The average ticket price last year was $131, up 23 percent from 2022, which accounts for some of the jump. Concert attendance climbed about 18 percent last year, to 70 million.
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour was the biggest of many success stories, estimated at just over $1 billion in ticket sales, a new high (with dozens of dates still to come in 2024). According to numbers crunched by Pollstar, Swifties paid an average of $239 per ticket to see her show.
Not every artist is
celebrating the post-pandemic touring boom, though. Those who operate below the
level of arenas and amphitheaters — and lack the promotional apparatus of a
Swift or a Beyoncé — have been sounding an alarm about skyrocketing costs, and
continuing supply-chain issues, that have eroded profit margins and made
touring riskier and more expensive for non-superstars.
ben sisario
There are 4,800 fewer movie screens.
Thanks to “Barbie,” “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” the 2023 domestic box office, which includes the United States and Canada, took in close to $9 billion. That’s a marked increase from 2022 but still not at prepandemic levels, when theaters reliably sold $11 billion in tickets annually.
Fewer films were released in 2023: There were 125 wide releases, down from 138 in 2019, said David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter [FranchiseRe (https://franchisere.substack.com/)] on box office numbers. Some films were delayed by the writers’ and actors’ strikes, which shut down Hollywood for close to six months [2 May-27 September 2023 and 14 July-9 November 2023, respectively.]
The number of
screens across the country has also declined. Some independent theater chains
like Pacific Theaters and ArcLight Cinemas went out of business. And the top
three U.S. chains, AMC, Regal and Cinemark, shut about 1,000 screens
collectively, according to David Hancock, the chief analyst for cinema at
Omdia, a London-based research company. He said that at the end of 2023, there
were 36,369 screens in the country, down 12 percent from the 41,172 screens
before the shutdown.
nicole sperling
Orchestra ticket sales are up 2 percent, yet some opera companies struggle.
Many orchestras are beginning to return to, or even exceed, prepandemic levels. The number of tickets that orchestras sold increased by 2 percent in 2023 compared with 2019, according to a study of 42 medium- and large-size orchestras by TRG Arts, an analytics firm, in partnership with the League of American Orchestras. Some continue to struggle, though, and some are giving fewer performances than they used to.
The Philadelphia Orchestra is averaging 78 percent attendance so far this season, compared with 63 percent before the pandemic. The New York Philharmonic, which completed a $550 million renovation of its hall in 2022 that made it more audience-friendly and reduced its seating capacity, is averaging 85 percent attendance this season compared with 74 percent before the pandemic. The San Francisco Symphony has had 74 percent attendance so far this season, slightly ahead of where it was before the shutdown, but it has fewer performances. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is now averaging 89 percent attendance, back where it was before the pandemic, even as the number of subscribers has fallen to 6,409 from 8,791.
But the Detroit Symphony Orchestra said that its attendance had fallen to 59 percent through March this season, down from 74 percent in the same period during the 2019-20 season, a drop it attributed to a loss of subscribers who have yet to return.
Many opera companies have had a hard time, as the cost of staging live opera — which requires sets, costumes, singers, chorus members and large orchestras — has risen. Ticket revenues at opera houses across the nation were down by about 22 percent last season compared with 2018-19, according to a recent study by Opera America, a nonprofit group, which said that so far this season, revenues are up.
At the Metropolitan Opera in New York, paid attendance is about 73 percent so far this season, compared with 71 percent at the same point in 2019-20, when fears of the pandemic were already beginning to keep operagoers away. And the Met now gives fewer performances overall. The pandemic has seriously strained the Met’s finances: The company has withdrawn about $70 million from its endowment over the past two seasons.
Many leading dance
companies have largely bounced back from the disruption brought by Covid.
Attendance at New York City Ballet so far this season is at 79 percent,
compared with 73 percent before the pandemic, and San Francisco Ballet is at 78
percent attendance, compared with 66 percent in the 2019-20 season.
javier c. hernández
Museum attendance is mixed.
While some major museums have been able to regain lost ground, others are still seeing fewer visitors, which continues to strain their already-stretched finances.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York reported nearly 861,000 visitors last year, a 26 percent decline from about 1.2 million visitors before the pandemic, when its Hilma af Klint exhibition [12 October 2018-23 April 2019] set new attendance records. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has seen a 15 percent decline over the same period, to 5.8 million visitors from 6.8 million, which could be partially attributed to the loss of its Met exhibition space at the Breuer building on Madison Avenue. And the Art Institute of Chicago said that attendance had also decreased by about 15 percent since the shutdown with about 1.3 million visitors in 2023, saying that while it now has more paid local visitors than it did before the pandemic, there are still fewer international visitors.
[The Met Breuer closed in July 2020 for budgetary reasons and the building was turned over to the Frick Collection while its Upper East Side home underwent expansion. The Frick vacated the Madison Avenue building on 3 March 2024 and it will be a facility of Sotheby’s auction house in September.]
Some regional organizations — relying more on local populations than international tourists — have seen stronger comebacks. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston said that it had experienced a 20 percent increase in visitors over the last fiscal year when compared to prepandemic levels. “We have also witnessed a change in the demographics of our audience, with a larger percentage of younger visitors, which bodes well for the future,” said Gary Tinterow, the museum’s director and chairman.
And the Hammer
Museum in Los Angeles, which completed a renovation project last year, said
that it attracted a record 277,882 visitors last year, up from 240,706 in 2019.
Zachary Small and Robin Pogrebin
Sports fans are back.
Sports fans are back. All four major sports leagues — the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League — had bigger attendance in their most recent regular seasons than they did in 2019, according to a calculation of the leagues’ data by The Times.
The N.F.L. saw the sharpest increase: 18.9 million people in 2023, up 10.9 percent from the 17 million people in 2019. That is in part because the league added a game to the regular-season schedule in 2021 as part of a new media-rights package. That bumped the total number of games played in a season from 256 to 272.
Attendance for Major
League Baseball increased 3.2 percent last season compared with its last full
season before the pandemic. The National
Basketball Association had a 1.2 percent increase and the National Hockey
League had a 1.1 percent increase.
Emmanuel Morgan
[This post is also the most recent entry in another ad hoc series: the effect of the COVID pandemic on the theater and the theater’s response to the crisis. Other posts on that topic are:
• “Theaters Go Dark Across the Nation,” 29 March and 1
April 2020
• “Suzan-Lori Parks on the Covid Pandemic,” 17 May 2020
• “Theater Online – A Preliminary Report” by Kirk
Woodward and Rick, 19 May 2020
• “‘Connecting through art when a pandemic keeps us apart’”
by Jeffrey Brown, 26 June 2020
• “Yo Yo Ma on the Artist’s Role in the Time of Covid-19,”
28 August 2020
• “‘Medical professionals turn to music as a tonic’” by
Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport, 22 September 2020
• “‘At this Virginia theater, the show – and the masks –
must go on’” by John Yang, et al.,
18 October 2020
• “‘Despite the Pandemic, It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like
“Christmas Carol’” by Jerald Raymond Pierce, 27 December 2020
• “‘Waiting out a pandemic – and for our “King Lear”’” by
Peter Marks, 11 January 2021
• “The Show Goes On During the Pandemic,” 26 January 2021
• “‘Great Performances’: The Arts Interrupted” produced and
directed by Akisa Omulepu, 3 and 6 June 2021
• “‘As Attendance Falls, Now Is the Winter of Broadway’s
Discontent’” by Michael Paulson, 23 January 2022
• “At the Theater: To Wear A Mask, Or Not To Wear A Mask,”
27 June 2022
[In addition, there are many other posts in which Covid, the coronavirus, the pandemic, and/or the shutdown gets a mention.]
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