“NYTW is swallowing a major financial loss on the production.”
Link, please. How much are the tickets, what was the average ticket price?
Not involved with the show here, but NYTW has walked the Broadway transfer road many times before. Hard to believe they wouldn’t have gotten
a) enhancement money to pay for the bulk of the production cost on the commercial side, and
b) used the show as a magnet for major underwriting grants on the NFP side, all the while making sure they get
c) torchbearer points or some kind of ongoing weekly percentage from the run of the Broadway transfer.
If anything, one would think NYTW had set up the whole thing so that most every dollar in ticket sales was “gravy”.
Also from upthread: “NYTW as a non-profit would have to pay favored nations (same salaries) to all their actors so it wasn't actor salaries.”
Please explain this further. This certainly isn’t the law for NFP orgs, nor an AEA rule. It may be the common justification the NFPs use to pay everyone scale that they possibly can, but do you really think the above the title headliners in shows at Roundabout, Lincoln Center, and MTC are taking home the same as everyone else? My guess would be “scale” as the salary of record for everyone, but some sort of signing bonus, bonus for completion of the engagement, per diem/expense allowance, bonus for award nomination or win, or back-end for the headliners. But yes, the journeyman actors are making scale. Favored nations for all the non-celebs/non-names, sure. Favored nations for the stars? No.
Even losing performances to press comps (which the jacked up final performance tickets would balance out), with 9 sold out weeks of 8 shows a week in a 199-seat theatre with no standing room, they could easily gross over $1M with an average ticket price well under $100.
If, as someone said earlier in the thread, tickets were a minimum of $150, that would put the gross for the sold out run over $2M, plus another $300K minimum on top of that for the final performance alone. How many of those CheapTix in the lottery are there?
And there’s no way NYTW let a production cost that much without commercial producer enhancement and corporate and private grants and underwriting. If their annual expenses and revenues are anything like their most recent financial reporting, a sold out hit that cost ~1/4 of their annual expenses made them lose money makes little sense. Are you sure you have your facts right?
