Box Office Up, Attendance Down on Broadway

Broadway had a great season last year--and a rotten one. Great at the box office. The League of American Theatres and Producers (formerly the League of New York Theatres and Producers) announced a record gross of $262 million, up 4% from last season’s $253 million, the previous record.

This didn’t mean that Broadway had more customers, however. Attendance actually fell off a bit, from 8.1 million to 8 million. So how could the “take” increase? A layman might point to the fact that ticket prices went up. (The average price jumped from $31.80 to $33.90.) But the league gave more weight to “the large number of musicals playing at virtual capacity at full-price tickets.”

The season offered fewer shows than any season in Broadway history--30. Ten of these productions were revivals, one was a “return engagement” (Michael Feinstein’s “Isn’t It Romantic?”) one was a “special attraction” (“Canciones de mi Padre”), and two were anthologies (“Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” and “Black and Blue.”) That leaves only 16 new shows. Pretty slim pickings.

The league also announced that “three new hotels will soon join the Marriott Marquis in Times Square.” That’s the hotel they tore down the Morosco and the Helen Hayes for. More hotels, fewer theaters, fewer shows--perhaps in the end Broadway will become a theme park.

Philip Kan Gotanda’s “Yankee Dawg, You Die,” previously seen at the Los Angeles Theatre Center and the Berkeley Rep, has opened Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, once again with Sab Shimono as an Asian-American film actor who can remember when stereotypes were all that an Asian-American actor was offered. You did them or you got out of the business.

Stan Egi plays the young Asian-American actor who scorns compromise, although he’s not above a bit of facial surgery. Frank Rich of the New York Times thought their confrontation was telling, without being preachy. “Mr. Gotanda is a polemicist who sees both sides of the picture, a writer whose grievances are balanced by a wicked sense of humor. He gladly embraces the ludicrous cliches of ‘Godzilla’ or World War II melodramas, if that’s what it takes to turn their racism inside out.”

Rich and the New Yorker’s Mimi Kramer also felt that the script tended to become “diagrammatic” in Act II. Howard Kissell of the Daily News saw some problems as well. But “as long as Gotanda focuses on the absurdity of the way Hollywood villainizes Asians, the play is amusing.”

TYPO OF THE WEEK. From South Coast Repertory’s newsletter: “Barbara Damashek, the Tony-dominated director, makes her SCR debut staging the musical. . . .”