That’s Gross! The Tony Impact

It happens every year: the Tony nominations come out, and like clockwork, the closing notices pop up. The first to go this year are Seminar (which closed on Sunday) and Magic/Bird (closing this Saturday, May 12). Both totally snubbed, they posted their notices within hours of the nominations announcement.

But if the snubbed shows often face closing notices, one would imagine that the nominated shows see major box-office increases, right? Well, let’s let the numbers do the talking. This week we examined the gross capacity percentages in all four major categories. The results, like the nominations themselves, have their fair share of surprises:

If you thought that getting a Tony nomination for Best Musical guaranteed you a safe spot on Broadway, then allow us to introduce you to Leap of Faith. A week after nabbing a nod for Best Musical, the show announced it’s closing. No surprise here – capacity was down, despite the fact that they spent the majority of last week giving away tickets to anyone who would take them. Looks like no amount of social media efforts (seriously – stop tweeting about that damn bus) or Tony nominations – not even the big one – could save Leap of Faith from its bad reviews and poor word-of-mouth.

Meanwhile, hooray to Once – the show that picked up the most Tony nominations this year, also saw the biggest gain in capacity this week. At 93%, it’s still not filling its house like Newsies, but it’s one of the highest weeks the show’s had since it began performance. And with its Best Musical win at the Lucille Lortel awards this weekend, Once might keep those numbers falling rising slowly.

Also of note, Nice Work if You Can Get It may have dropped in capacity, but it actually saw the biggest increase—$192,360—in grosses over any other show on Broadway. Does that mean that with 10 nominations, they’ve stopped discounting?

Clybourne Park saw a slight increase over last week. Probably not enough to attribute to the Tony nominations, but it’s still filling more of its house than the other nominated plays. Other Desert Cities surprisingly lost some of its audience, though the week before it had a 6.5% gain in capacity, so it’s basically a wash. Looks like it’s plateauing around the same percentage it performed at for most of March/April. Like Venus, this plateau is probably a symptom of being out so long. Then there’s Peter and the Starcatcher, which saw the second-biggest gain in capacity from the Tony nominations. Must be that starstuff! Or our praise of Christian Borle in our SMASH Reality Index.

Porgy’s been running the longest, so we’re going to guess that it’s 4.6% drop in capacity had more to do with the fact that plenty of people have seen it already. But even at its peak, Porgy only hit 96% capacity (w/e 1/29/12) – a far cry from the 97-99% capacity Evita’s houses have been having. Porgy’s going to have to do a lot more box office to catch up to Evita’s capacity. Either that or cast Ricky Martin.

No surprise here that Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman continues to dominate. It’s a tough ticket to get (seriously – does anyone have an extra? Dave still hasn’t seen it yet). But the big shocker here is Gore Vidal’s The Best Man? A 24.1% drop in capacity! That’s insane. And the highest drop in capacity of any show – nominated or not nominated – this week. What the hell happened? As far as we can tell, none of the play’s eight above-the-title stars were out last week, so it couldn’t be an understudy issue. Maybe it’s the fact that the show only grabbed two Tony nominations (for this and Lead Actor James Earl Jones)? But that shouldn’t make a difference, should it? Did everyone just forget about it? Election overload? What do you think?