Pretendinitis

It’s a disease whose grip Broadway seems unable to free itself from, as producers, reporters and everyone else can’t come to terms with the idea that a sold out show is an EXCEPTION rather than a rule.

To be clear, that’s not a Broadway thing; it’s just a ‘reality’ thing.  The vast majority of shows don’t sell out in all genres, in all markets, at all times.  Yet, so often producers feel the overpowering urge to pretend they are sold out.

But why?  After all, a very, very healthy show can be 15 to 20% unsold and run forever.

What’s the problem with that exactly?

The problem is that when they want to impress each other with how great they are, Broadway producers like to snipe about who is and isn’t selling out their houses, with the core idea being that if you’re not selling out, your show is ‘unpopular.’

But a quick glance at the numbers shows that by that standard, the industry is full of losers.  Could that really be?

No, it couldn’t.

Take ’9 to 5′ for instance.  It’s 100% sold out, at an average ticket price of $47.49, and a total gross of about $535K.  Fine.  Nothing wrong with any of that.

But compare it to Mary Poppins, which is “just” 88.5% sold at an average ticket price of $72.58 and a total gross of more than $1mm for the week, or almost double the sold out 9 to 5.

(Side note:  I don’t know whether the ‘average ticket price’ listed here is just tickets sold or the better measure of ‘revenue per seat’ that theatres should be using.  You’ve been warned.)

Well, we don’t know the details of the cost structure of the two shows, but let’s assume they’re roughly equal.  Which business model works better?

My guess is that 88% of a bigger house at a higher price beats 100% of a smaller house at a lower price like Kelly Clarkson beats William Hung on American Idol.

And then again, the business model on ’9 to 5′ is probably pretty solid too, but the obsession with being sold out is silly.

So here’s my hope that this strange desire on the part of people in the Broadway community to pretend they’re sold out goes away.  It’s unhealthy for the business when most weeks, for most shows, they are not.  No one outside your echo chamber denigrates you for that.  They denigrate or praise you for making a show that they want to see or don’t want to see.

And before anyone says, “yes, but if a show is sold out, more people want to see it,” I have to stop you right there.  You’ve got the logic backwards.

If a show and its marketing are good, it will sell well, and depending on the size of the house and a bunch of other factors, you might just sell all the tickets you have.

So what?  As an entrepreneur, I could challenge you on that in two ways:

-Why didn’t you raise the prices?

-Why didn’t you get a bigger house?

Your primary concern should be the delivery of a great experience and the successful marketing of that experience to more and more people. Does turning people away further those goals?  In the short term, maybe, although you may have noticed that people have more and more ways of entertaining themselves now, and might lose interest if they can’t buy from you while they’re interested.  Time Kills Deals, one of my old bosses used to say.

Are you sure they are so in love that they will definitely find you when you finally get around to making your product available for them to buy?  Given that about 2/3rds of Broadway sales are tourists with just a few days to buy, are you SURE you want to take that risk?  You might be a Nintendo Wii, but then again…

Selling out is good for the ego, but it’s also possibly a sign that you made some mistakes in pricing and venue selection.  What do you plan to do about that?