08/11/2026
The truth about "Next Year"...... If you want to keep arts organizations in your community, please please please no more " I will volunteer to help out NEXT YEAR" or "Sorry about this year, but we will make sure to leave room in the schedule for the kids to do camp NEXT YEAR" or " I meant to come see a show but somehow those three weeks of your season just slipped away. See you NEXT YEAR" or "Come to me for a donation NEXT YEAR". Cuz for many many many grassroots small arts organizations there is no "NEXT YEAR" without your participation/ support/ patronage/ donation THIS YEAR. This article was written about another theater company but it is a sad fact for so many of us...small, grassroots theater is not only struggling it is DYING....
Article...
efore anybody asks: no, I haven’t worked in this business full time in over ten years.
I spent 32 years in it before that. Performance, lighting design, production management, upper management. I’ve sat on theatre boards. I watched a company I loved fold from the inside, and that’s the part that stays with me. How long everybody knew before anybody said it out loud.
I still read the grosses. Weekly. I still have friends running these buildings and friends who lost their jobs when the buildings went dark. Walking away from the payroll didn’t make me stop paying attention. If anything it means I can say this without it costing me a job.
So here’s what actually happened last week:
Cats: The Jellicle Ball closed Saturday. Five months early. Three Tony Awards, and it averaged almost 94% capacity for its entire run. 159,000 people came through those doors.
And it never had a chance. Not from day one.
Do the math with me. It’s all public.
The Broadhurst has 1,218 seats. Eight shows a week. That’s 9,744 seats to sell, and Playbill has them averaging $111.29 a ticket. So a week where you sell every single seat, every single night, nobody left in the lobby, gets you about $1.08 million.
Reported weekly running cost was just under a million.
Read that again. At perfect attendance, and I mean PURRRRFECT (I had to) you’re clearing maybe eighty grand a week. Against an $18 million capitalization, which is in the securities filings. Anybody can look it up.
That’s three and a half years without a single soft week just to get the investors back to even.
Never a heat wave. Never a cast member out. Never a slow January.
Well we all know, that ain’t happenin’.
And that was the ceiling. The plan required beating the ceiling.
Read that again. Slowly.
Somebody sat with that spreadsheet in 2024 and said YES anyway.
And let’s be honest about the property while we’re at it.
Cats is not exactly the crown jewel. It’s a plotless song cycle about alley cats introducing themselves for two and a half hours, and it’s been dragged out, toured, revived, filmed and merchandised for forty-plus years. It might be the most simultaneously revered and eye-rolled title in the whole ALW catalog. People will tell you it changed Broadway and that they never want to sit through it again, in the same sentence.
Now the reinvention was real. Moving it into ballroom was a brilliant idea and the reviews and the Tonys back that up. But you’re still opening with a title a huge chunk of the ticket-buying public has already made up its mind about. That’s a known ceiling on your pricing power going in. It’s a thing you account for in the capitalization.
They didn’t account for it. They budgeted like they had a title and a style people were desperate to see for the first time.
Now here’s the part that should really keep people up at night.
The minute they announced the closing, the show caught fire. Last two weeks of the run it broke its own house record twice in a row. Week ending August 2 it did $1.41 million, over 100% of capacity, top ten on Broadway for the first time all run. Sold out.
They were turning people away.
Do you understand what that means? Suddenly people were paying about $140 a head for a show that had averaged $111 for four months. The demand was sitting there the whole time. It took a deadline to shake it loose.
And even THAT didn’t fix it. Best week the show ever had and it clears maybe four hundred grand over the nut. You’d need forty-five straight weeks of the best week of your life to pay back the capitalization.
Nobody sustains a closing notice for a year.
Which is the whole point. This didn’t start when the reviews came out, or when the Tonys aired, or when somebody posted something ugly online. It started in a room two years ago, when the number, the house and the size of the company got decided. By opening night it was already over. Everything after that was watching it happen.
I keep thinking about the producer I worked for in Atlanta. We played the Fox. Forty-six hundred and sixty-five seats to sell, every single night, and that man could tell you the break-even on a house before he’d tell you the title. That’s not being cheap about art. That’s knowing exactly how many people are counting on you to be right.
Show him 1,218 seats carrying a million dollar week and he’d have laughed you out of the room.
And we still folded. Not because the seats weren’t there. Because of who ended up making the decisions.
Which belongs in this conversation too. All the capacity in the world doesn’t save you from the wrong hands on the wheel. That’s what boards are for, and it’s the job most boards are worst at.
So before this becomes about something it isn’t (oops, probably late to that party): no cast, no title, no review, no amount of noise online makes a million dollar weekly nut disappear. Those costs were locked before one ticket went on sale.
The expense line doesn’t read the internet.
Here’s the part folks better take heed of.
This is NOT just a Broadway problem. Same math, smaller numbers, everywhere.
San Diego Rep. Triad Stage. Southern Rep in New Orleans. Book-It in Seattle. Long Wharf gave up the building they’d been in 57 years. The Mark Taper went dark and everyone politely called it a pause.
Peter Marks ran the list in the Washington Post back in 2023 and it was long then. The NEA was reporting two to three theatre organizations closing a month.
A MONTH.
And here’s what gets me. Nobody’s even keeping an official count. Best anyone will tell you is “probably hundreds.”
Three weeks ago Oskar Eustis announced he’s leaving the Public and told the LA Times the American nonprofit theater movement is over. He said it’s over. I don’t know that I disagree with him.
And underneath all of it, the number nobody wants to say out loud: 25 to 30 percent of the audience never came back after March 2020. Not out of fear. Theatre just stopped being the thing they do and something else filled the slot.
That audience isn’t coming back on its own. This field spent six years budgeting like it would.
So. Owners, boards, executive directors, artistic directors.
Get out of la la land, and ya better do it NOW.
The budget has to be solid before the season gets announced, not reconciled after it fails. Loving a piece is not a revenue line. Every season built on “it’ll find its audience once people see it” is the exact bet Broadway just lost with $18 million on the table and a house at 94%.
And know your months of cash on hand. Not the annual budget. Not the deficit. How many weeks could you operate if ticket income stopped tomorrow.
Under three and you’re not running a theatre. You’re running a countdown.
If your board has never been shown that number, ask for it at the next meeting. How people react to the question will tell you more than the answer does.
The bailout can’t be the plan either. Emergency appeals work once.
Do you hear me? ONCE. After that you’re whining.
The second one tells your donors you never adjusted, and they can absolutely tell the difference between a hard year and a model that quit working. Nobody is coming to fund the old way back to life. Not the state, not the county, not your five biggest names.
Right-size now, while it’s still your call to make.
And for everybody else: some of the companies in your own town are a lot closer to the edge than they’ll ever say publicly. That announcement always comes about eighteen months after the board already knew.
Don’t let a closing notice be the thing that finally gets you in the seat. That’s exactly what just happened on 44th Street, and it was five months too late.
Buy the ticket now. Renew the subscription. Take a chance on the new work instead of waiting to hear if it’s any good.
“I always meant to go” doesn’t keep the lights on.
