Anyone trying to book for many theatre shows in London will know the feeling: interest and then excitement, followed by a growing despair with the realisation that most, if not all, tickets have long gone.
The Importance of Being Earnest at the National Theatre, which opened late last year, rapidly sold out much of its entire run. Very few tickets at all are available to see Paul Mescal’s Olivier award-winning return in A Streetcar Named Desire in February. Meanwhile, long-running shows such as The Lion King and Hamilton reliably fill up auditoriums every week.
As visitors have flooded back — between July and September last year, the West End attracted 22.6mn visitors, a 6.7 per cent increase in footfall compared with the previous year, according to the Heart of London Business Alliance — audiences have soared above pre-pandemic levels. In the first three-quarters of 2024, according to industry body the Society of London Theatre (Solt), attendances reached 13.2mn and revenues of £793mn, up from 13.1mn and £735mn in the same period the previous year.
Producers now expect that the number of people who have visited London theatres in 2024 will easily match the 17.1mn recorded for 2023, with revenues expected to be higher — an astonishing comeback for a sector that many feared would be irretrievably damaged by Covid-19 and pummelled by the UK’s cost of living crisis.
On Broadway in New York, however, it has been a very different tale since the end of the pandemic. According to a report last summer by New York State comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, attendances at Broadway theatres remain below pre-pandemic levels. Sales for the 2023-24 season on Broadway were about $1.5bn, or about a sixth lower than sales for the last season before lockdowns closed the district in March 2020.
Elton John’s new Broadway musical, Tammy Faye, based on the life of the televangelist, was forced to shut just weeks after opening, having struggled to sell tickets. The Heart of Rock and Roll, a jukebox musical featuring the songs of Huey Lewis and the News, closed in the summer after two months.
For producers in London, the trend is throwing into question the time-honoured tradition of the Broadway transfer — long seen as the jewel in the crown for a successful West End show.
“London is doing beautifully, but it is becoming so much more difficult to transfer work from London to New York,” says Zoe Snow, partner at GBA, which has produced shows including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in the West End and was technical director for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child internationally. “Mounting a production that can achieve success in New York is harder and harder,” she adds, pointing to the costs of production in the US.
The trend is a decisive shift in the balance between two cities that have long vied to be the world capital of theatre. It illustrates contrasting approaches to the relationship between art and commerce. For many producers, London — and the UK theatre sector more generally — is increasingly seen as a crucible for fresh, risk-taking work, while Broadway risks becoming a home for unadventurous revivals, Hollywood spin-offs or celebrity casting.
The question is whether this realignment is temporary, or heralds a permanent change. “New York has not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels of audience,” says the London-based producer Patrick Gracey, whose recent stagings include new versions of Chekhov’s The Seagull starring Cate Blanchett and Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock with Mark Rylance.
“We have some of the best creatives; some of the best writers, directors, designers, as well as best actors in the world.”
Sitting in the Gielgud Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue the day after the first preview performance of his new West End production of Oliver!, the veteran British producer and theatre owner Sir Cameron Mackintosh says business has rarely been better.
“I’m going through a very, very successful patch. London is far busier for most of the year than it ever was pre-Covid,” he says. “We used to have bigger troughs, after Christmas and in September, but it seems to be levelling with London filling up with more and more people.”
Mackintosh’s three longest-running West End shows — Les Misérables, Phantom of the Opera and Hamilton — have, he says, “gone back to virtual capacity every performance . . . with a bigger advance than they’ve had for many years”.
Even more challenging productions have beat expectations. An avant-garde adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus by the director Robert Icke, which was co-produced by Gracey and Sonia Friedman Productions and opened in another of Mackintosh’s theatres, easily earned back its London costs. Oedipus did not have a single unsold seat throughout its run, which ends Saturday. “It became a huge hit and recouped in a very short time,” says Mackintosh.
One big advantage London has over New York is its generous system of tax credits, which enable as much as a third of the budget for new shows to be recouped, theatre producers say. Last spring, the UK government announced an increase in the amount of tax relief that can be claimed for creating new productions to 40 per cent, double what it was before the pandemic — something that has helped spur the sector’s recovery, according to industry insiders. These tax credits are “literally life-changing for producers,” says Kenny Wax, the producer behind The Play That Goes Wrong and Six.
Commercial producers also benefit from the UK’s long-established system of arts subsidy — less than in cultural powerhouses such as Germany and France, but still generous compared with anything available in the US. Despite recent cuts, the taxpayer-funded Arts Council England supports nearly 1,000 arts organisations to the tune of nearly £500mn annually, nourishing a varied ecosystem that allows new work to be workshopped, developed and tested in subsidised theatres before it braves the commercial West End.
Increasingly, American producers are opting to develop work in Britain before bringing it across the Atlantic, such as Stranger Things, a co-production between Netflix and Sonia Friedman. “There is a phenomenon of US productions starting in the UK before coming to Broadway — often English actors with American accents — to benefit from the subsidised work and lower costs,” says Matt Torney, artistic director of the non-profit company Theatrical Outfit in Atlanta, Georgia, one of the city’s largest producing theatres. “They can take aesthetic risks in the UK — in the US, one turkey and we might have to close.”
Francesca Moody, a British producer known for bringing the original theatrical versions of Fleabag and Baby Reindeer to the Edinburgh Fringe, after which both transferred successfully to London, says that this means that the UK has a strong pipeline of new work, “important for the future of the theatre”.
“You can think outside the box to how you are inviting audiences into your theatre,” she says.
Tax credits and subsidies also mean that producers and theatre owners are often able to keep prices down. Despite criticism that top-tier tickets for West End shows are increasingly unaffordable — the most expensive seats for a starry production of Cabaret at the Playhouse Theatre are now more than £300 — the average cost of a ticket in London is just under £60, according to Solt figures, compared with more than $125 in New York.
Eleanor Lloyd, whose production company in the West End was behind Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution in County Hall, says that the effect is producers are less reliant on celebrity casting or other tricks to pull in audiences. “In London, shows without stars can find their place,” she says.
The sheer “breadth of work” available in London sets it apart, Lloyd says. “There is something for everyone — Agatha Christie, Greek tragedy. A Céline Dion musical!”
New York, by contrast, has struggled more after the pandemic. Mackintosh, who co-produced Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, still the longest-running show in Broadway history until it closed in 2023, does not have any productions in New York’s premier theatre district.
Analysts have pointed to various factors, notably the lingering effects of the pandemic — which closed theatres across the US for many months then depressed audience figures when they reopened — and the lack of long-term government support. But, says Mackintosh, there is a starker reason too: “The real problem in America is that the cost of running a show has escalated beyond all reason.”
Some of the large-scale shows that would have broken even at $700,000 a week pre-Covid now require more than a million dollars per week to turn a profit, he says.
Many New York theatre workers are unionised, which means labour costs are comparatively expensive, while the cost of theatre rents is also criticised by producers as debilitatingly high.
According to Wax, the West End staging of The Play That Goes Wrong, which began life in a tiny fringe theatre before being picked up by commercial producers, cost £300,000 and is now in its 10th year in the West End, having easily survived Covid. On Broadway, it cost $4mn to mount and lasted just two years before moving to a smaller, more economical off-Broadway space.
“It is a totally different scale of capitalisation, costs and margins,” he says. Larger productions “do not get much change” from $20mn, he adds.
Others worry that audiences seem less inclined to travel into Midtown, where Broadway theatres are clustered. Overseas tourists have returned to New York but numbers are still below pre-pandemic levels, according to the report from the city’s comptroller. Still, New York City Tourism + Conventions, the destination marketing organisation, said that the five boroughs attracted 64.3mn travellers by the end of 2024, reaching 97 per cent of its record 2019 visitation level of nearly 67mn.
But one producer, who declined to be named, says that for some local people Manhattan has become “less attractive as a place, certainly downtown and around Times Square. People are thinking of this being a bit more dangerous than it used to be, a little less clean.”
London theatres, by contrast, appear to be benefiting from an influx of American visitors, helped by the strong dollar. “Suddenly we have back that couple from Boston who come to London for two weeks and . . . will see about 10 shows,” says the producer. “You sit next to them in the theatre, you can see their list: ‘What are we doing tomorrow, darling?’”
However, after a tough 2023-24 season, Broadway is slowly bouncing back owing to a strong Christmas period, with attendances and grosses in just over the first half of the new season about 16 per cent higher than last year.
According to US theatre magazine Playbill, Broadway had the highest grossing Christmas week since 2018, boosting hopes that the district is set to follow London’s recovery.
Producers also point out that Broadway is not bereft of new commercial successes to go alongside mainstays such as Wicked, which just before Christmas became the first show ever to gross $5mn in one week, The Lion King or Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, all but guaranteed to make money.
An experimental reimagining of Lloyd Webber’s adaptation of Sunset Boulevard, featuring the Pussycat Dolls star Nicole Scherzinger, is doing good business at the St James Theatre on West 44th Street.
In November, Cole Escola’s new Abraham Lincoln-themed comedy Oh, Mary! became the first show of the 2024-25 Broadway season to recoup its costs, according to its producers, having transferred from a smaller off-Broadway venue.
The touring network of regional theatres across the US, where costs are lower and many shows travel after Broadway, seems to be in rude health. “US regional touring is doing well — there are not the same costs as Broadway and there is strong demand,” says Snow of GBA. “People can wait to see a world-class show come to them, and its much cheaper.”
In the UK it flips again, with regional theatres often struggling more to secure guaranteed audiences outside the capital, although the pantomime season — when many theatres make their biggest returns — has been impressively strong. London-based Crossroads Pantomimes, the world’s largest pantomime producer with 23 shows playing across Britain in 2024, said its version of Robin Hood at the London Palladium was its fastest-selling production at the historic West End venue since it started shows there nine years ago. A Crossroads staging of Aladdin at Newcastle’s Theatre Royal has had similar success.
David Ian, chief executive of parent company Crossroads Live, says that the organisation, which produces a broad roster of commercial shows in regional theatres in the UK, US and Australia, has had a record-breaking year, with 4.5mn tickets sold and gross revenues of £260mn, “which is phenomenal year-on-year growth”.
Another regional UK producer, Emily Wood, co-founder of Evolution Productions, says that the 10 pantomimes produced by the company were selling at record levels in 2024, with about 15 per cent increase in sales on average compared with 2023.
“There has been a resurgence in pantomime. Sales are way better than before the pandemic. It will cost over £100 to take the family out, but most see that as an investment worth making.”
But a good Christmas is not always enough for the UK’s theatres, which will need to entice crowds back to their venues throughout the year amid tough economic conditions.
After the government raised employers’ national insurance contributions at the recent Budget, labour costs are set to rise. UK economic growth has been sluggish to non-existent, and inflation has eaten into household budgets, leading to fears that theatre trips will feel to many people like a luxury.
If costs rise, producers are worried what that will mean for ticket prices already criticised as too high and for reaching future generations of theatre fans. “Ticket prices are so important — they are the gateway,” says Moody, the theatre producer.
Even in the best of times, commercial theatre has never been a safe bet for investors, whichever side of the Atlantic it is staged: many shows never recoup their initial investment, never mind make a profit. Producers are now asking if Broadway can maintain its recent momentum into the new year and beyond.
Yet, fresh from his success with Oedipus, producer Gracey is confident that British drama will continue to lead the way. “The UK is the best place in the world to make and to see theatre, and a huge part of that and its strength is in the diversity of offering,” he says. “Not every show is for everyone, but there is a show for everyone.”
Data visualisation by Ian Bott
