The Broadway League, the national trade association for the Broadway industry, has released end-of-season statistics for the 2023-2024 Broadway season. The 52-week season, which began on May 22, 2023, and ended on May 19, grossed a cumulative $1,539,278,706. This total is steady with the season-end gross for the 2022-2023 season, down a mere 2.4%. There were 12,287,708 admissions to Broadway in the 2023-2024 season, a tally which is almost on par (a 0.04% difference) with the attendance of the season prior.
“The 2023-2024 Broadway season was another wonderful year, with attendance of 12.3 million and Broadway shows grossing $1.54 billion dollars. Audiences are responding to the incredible variety of plays, musicals and specials that we have on Broadway,” said Jason Laks, interim president of the Broadway League, in a statement. “Broadway continues to provide a dynamic space for audiences and artists to explore diverse worlds and narratives together and remains a place where everyone can find something they will love to see.”
These figures are not back to Broadway’s pre-pandemic levels of gross and attendance. The 2018-2019 season was both the highest-grossing ($1.83 billion) and best-attended (14.77 million) season on record.
Capacity, however, proved on-par with the 2018-2019 season. Seats in theaters were filled to 89.63% capacity this season, a difference of an ever-so-slight 0.12 percentage points from the capacity figure of 89.75% seen in 2018-2019, and an increase of 1.28 percentage points from 2022-2023.
Steady with last season is the number of playing weeks: 1,471, which is three less than the previous season. A barometer of the industry’s health, playing weeks refers to the number of shows playing each week added up for the entire season. Additionally, attendance per playing week (the average number of admissions per show per week) came to 8,353, up from 8,333 in the 2022-2023 season.
In the 2023-2024 season, 39 new productions opened: 21 musicals, 16 plays and two specials.
