The show must go on
The Phantom of the Opera, the longest-running show in Broadway history, will linger in Manhattan a little longer after its February 2023 curtain call was pushed back by 8 weeks.
The musical has been a major hit with Broadway audiences for nearly 35 years and, after the September announcement that Phantom would fade away in the new year, the production has seen a huge sales boost, reportedly pulling in $2.2m in the last week alone. Data collated by IBDB shows how Phantom, over more than 13,000 individual performances, maintained a remarkable 90% average attendance rate from 1988-2019 — with nearly every show sold-out for the first 8 years of its run.
Stranger than you dreamt it
Indeed, Phantom's attendance figures only really began to drop noticeably in 2022. Broadway theaters, like much of the performing arts industry recently, have struggled — Forbes neatly ascribing 2022’s spate of show closures on the strip to “costs, COVID, and crime”.
Calling time on a Broadway heavyweight like Phantom could be seen as a clear marker of how tough things have got — but it’s also natural for shows to lose momentum after almost 4 decades at the top. If Phantom's been on your Broadway bucket list we wish you luck — searches for tickets have spiked dramatically.
