A group of theater producers is taking long-running Broadway hits and moving them off Broadway, where costs are lower and the profit potential is significant.
The first test case, “Avenue Q,” won a Tony Award for best musical. The show cost $3.5 million to mount on Broadway in 2003; an additional $4 million was spent on marketing alone in its first year. By 2009 the show, wasn’t a hot seller anymore, yet “Avenue Q,” with its foul-mouthed puppet stars, had become a brand name.
The producers moved the show to a smaller Off Broadway house, where weekly costs fell by two-thirds, in 2009, and earned their entire investment back in 13 weeks. Only $700,000 was needed for marketing that first year.
This summer they plan to revive “Rent,” another Tony winner that ran for 12 years and closed in 2008. The musical will cost $1.5 million to mount off Broadway.
“My job is to exploit ‘Rent’ and ‘Avenue Q’ as far and wide as I can,” said Jeffrey Seller, one of the producers. “Our bet is that 4,000 people a week will still want to see these shows at $80 a seat, rather than 8,000 a week on Broadway at $120 a seat.”
But not every show has had the crucial brand name: the veteran producer Barry Weissler considered making the same move for his musical “The Scottsboro Boys,” but concluded that it was not well known enough to avoid an expensive marketing campaign.
Some producers see a rosier future for the 30 commercial Off Broadway houses, which have between 99 and 499 seats and are a tough place to make money.
Usually hit shows move from off Broadway to Broadway, whether musicals like “Hair” and “A Chorus Line” or plays like “Torch Song Trilogy ” and “Doubt.” Moreover, most of these shows begin at nonprofit Off Broadway theaters ; the for-profit Off Broadway landscape has gone through feast-famine cycles for decades.
The producers of the new, for-profit “Rent” and “Avenue Q” hope their approach will at least stabilize commercial Off Broadway, which once teemed with long-running shows .
“I think what the ‘Rent’-‘Avenue Q’ guys are trying is very important because it’s so hard to make a brand happen Off Broadway, with its lower visibility,” said Daryl Roth, a veteran producer. She has produced several new shows off Broadway recently, including Charles Busch’s “Divine Sister,” a loving riff on happy-nun movies.
“Perhaps,” Ms. Roth added, “we’ll learn if Broadway shows can become a renewable, low-cost resource for Off Broadway, and not just for the more expensive tours and London runs.”
While 70 percent of Broadway shows lose money, the percentage is universally believed to be even greater off Broadway. Moreover, few Off Broadway shows will ever make one rich, unlike Broadway’s “Wicked” (which has earned $542 million there so far) or even “Rent” ($274 million).
The rewards of producing off Broadway began declining a decade ago as labor costs increased and star s began gravitating to Broadway. Producers opted to double their investment and put it into a Broadway show in hopes of a hit. Off Broadway sold $30 million in tickets in the 2009-10 season; Broadway, about $1 billion.
That latest strategy is not without potential pitfalls. Audiences are fickle; “Rent,” an early ‘90s story inspired by “La Boheme,” might seem old ? it has toured extensively and a movie version came out in 2005 . (The show opens on August 11.)
The recent commercial revival of “Our Town” off Broadway illustrates the challenge of doing business the old way. The show cost only $400,000 to mount and had a large cast of 25 actors; “Our Town” drew rave reviews, ran for 18 months and grossed more than $4 million. Yet it just broke even.
Commercial Off Broadway has some recent hits, like “Freud’s Last Session,” “Love, Loss, and What I Wore” and “The Divine Sister.”
“The biggest financial success, to me,” said Scott Morfee, an “Our Town” producer, “was that 50 people earned a living in the theater for 18 months, with pension and health benefits, during 2009 and half of 2010 when a lot of other Americans were struggling.”
By PATRICK HEALY
