Broadway Box Office Rises As Audiences Seek Out Holiday Comfort Food

Apart from the blazing start for To Kill a Mockingbird, overall Broadway grosses for the week ending December 23 reflected a holiday-season gravitation to familiar crowd-pleasers.

Total box office came in at about $41 million, up 3% from last week and a stout 19% from the same week a year ago, according to the Broadway League. The momentum continues for the 2018-19 season to date, with total grosses of $1.074 billion up 17% over last season’s pace and attendance up nearly 10%.

Mockingbird set a full-week record for any play in the Shubert Organization’s history, pulling in almost $1.6 million. Other plays from the latest crop of debuts held steady but did not put up numbers nearly as gaudy. Network, the film adaptation starring Bryan Cranston, collected $1.2 million, essentially flat with a week ago. The Ferryman, meanwhile, slipped 17% to $791,861, while The Lifespan of a Fact inched up $839,866 from $790,460 the previous week.

Recent musical arrivals The Cher Show and Pretty Woman dipped to $1.1 million and $1 million, respectively.

Several well-established shows, meanwhile, saw significant upticks as holiday gift-givers bet on safer names. Mean Girls gained 16% to a shade less than $1.6 million, Frozen rose 10% to $2.1 million and Aladdin gained 24% to $1.752 million.

Even longer-in-the-tooth attractions like Wicked, Hamilton and The Lion King also posted double-digit increases.

Choir Boy, which took in $172,471 last week from eight previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, will be Broadway’s first opening of 2019, on January 8.