BROADWAY TICKET PRICES ON TARGET?

Are Broadway theater tickets too expensive? Sure, but so is everything else these days.

That’s the argument of a report just released by the League of American Theaters and Producers, formerly the League of New York Theaters and Producers. The league commissioned a well-known Princeton economist, Dr. William Baumol, to compare the cost of Broadway tickets today (as high as $47.50) with yesterday’s prices and those of the day before yesterday.

Baumol and his team concluded that the cost of Broadway tickets had indeed shot up in the last few years ($17.45 was the top price in 1978,) but that this was an attempt to catch up with an “erosion” in Broadway ticket prices that had begun with the Depression, and had continued all through the postwar years.

The top ticket for a Broadway musical in 1929 was about $6, the report noted. In terms of buying that was about on a par with today’s prices. Moreover, because of rising real incomes, “the 1985 attendee is far better able . . . to purchase a ticket than was his predecessor 25 or 50 years ago.”

The report also argued that Broadway ticket prices haven’t gone up any more sharply of late, percentage-wise, than those for films and for nonprofit theater. Considering the cost-effectiveness of movie making and the subsidies of nonprofit theater, Broadway had pulled off quite an “extraordinary feat” in keeping tickets so reasonable.

Baumol conceded that the report might engender skepticism, having been commissioned by a trade group. It seems to have done just that. For example, the report mentioned the “devil theory” that Broadway profiteering was the real source of high ticket prices, but it offered no data on Broadway profits and losses at all.

Meanwhile, Variety reports that the New York attorney general’s office has wound up an inquiry into whether the executives who guide the fortunes of the Shubert Organization, Broadway’s major landlord, are overpaid. The answer: no.

The question falls under state purview because the Shubert Organization, a for-profit venture, is allied with the Shubert Foundation, a not-for-profit institution.

The executives, Bernard Jacobs and Gerald Schoenfeld, each earned more than $840,000 in 1984, plus bonuses. Given the size of the Shubert empire (16 Broadway theaters plus road houses) and the record of the Jacobs-Schoenfeld team since it took the helm in 1972, the attorney general’s office ruled that that was reasonable recompense.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Ex-Soviet director Yuri Lyubimov, to Reuter’s John Morrison, on his battles with Moscow’s cultural bureaucrats: “I just about managed to teach something to one official when he was replaced by a new one. I started to be nostalgic for the old one and think what a nice fellow he was. The old one played chess. The new one couldn’t even play dominoes.”