Once the Christmas lights dim and New Year hangovers have been cured, the real hangover starts for Broadway theaters, which go into overdrive trying to keep box office grosses up during the lean, tourist-fallow months of January and February. Some big shows offer two-for-one ticket discounts, while the Theater League’s Kids’ Night event encourages parents to drag their tykes to Times Square. Longer-running shows recruit big-name cast replacements to fire up audience interest, as when Fran Drescher becomes Cinderella’s nasty stepmom in February.
But some shows just can’t make it past the new-year curve, or even pre-plan their obsolescence for the first weekend of the new annum. As such, five Broadway shows are closing this weekend, which is a pretty typical percentage for this time of year. Among the casualties of 2014:
“ANNIE” – a revival of the 1977 audience favorite that received mixed reviews but enough audience interest to spark a run of nearly 500 performances since its opening in October 2012 at the Palace Theater.
“BETRAYAL” – This revival of Harold Pinter’s in-reverse classic could have run another year, assuming real-life married leads Rachel Weisz and Daniel Craig could have been persuaded to forsake their Hollywood fortunes in exchange for the relative poverty of Broadway. Reviewers found Mike Nichols’ staging surfacey and broad, but everyone looks great, and the show’s three-month limited run at the Ethel Barrymore Theater was virtually sold out before it even opened.
“SEVEN HUNDRED SUNDAYS” – Another limited engagement for a show that could have run longer if Billy Crystal thought to himself, “hmm, let’s run this longer.” The solo took in nearly $1.5 million during Christmas week and never grossed less than a mil since opening at the Imperial Theater in mid-November.
“FIRST DATE” – A new musical with no marquee names and rather dismissive reviews proved a bit more resilient at the box office than one might have imagined when it opened back in August. Critics wrote love letters to lead Zachary Levi, which probably helped the Austin Winsberg, Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner tuner reach 174 performances before closing Sunday at the Longacre.
“SPIDER-MAN: TURN OFF THE DARK” – Is there anything left to say about the wake of this financially disastrous, physically dangerous, aesthetically iffy and legally contentious musical? Hey, it ran 1,268 performances at the Foxwoods Theater, pushing the U2/Julie Taymor tuner into the top 100-longest running Broadway shows of all time. And who knows? Maybe what happens in Vegas will help it stay in Vegas – until it recoups.
