This year all but one of Broadway's new musicals need a Tony

Each year, every new musical wants to win the Tony award for best musical. But this year, it would not be out of line to say almost every new musical needs to win.

Last year, it was clear that A Strange Loop needed the kind of attention the award brings, and the show got a Tony boost to add to its earlier Pulitzer prize. While the groundbreaking show never became a smash at the box office, it sustained its run through early 2023 and the Tonys were certainly a factor even if they didn’t turn the show into a juggernaut. In contrast, even without the best musical crown, both Six and MJ the Musical have turned into bona fide hits that will likely be on Broadway for some time to come.

With just two weeks before the Tony eligibility deadline for 2023, there is only one breakout new musical this season: the import & Juliet, regularly crossing the $1 million mark. Otherwise, scanning the field, Kimberly Akimbo, despite excellent reviews, hovers weekly in the neighbourhood of $500,000 grosses; its best week to date was the Christmas holiday week, when it edged just over the $600,000 mark. The just-opened Shucked, which has been filling its preview houses with low-priced seats, had its best week ever, grossing $555,000 last week, but as with Kimberly Akimbo, these are low numbers for a musical, even small-cast ones. Bad Cinderella, a much more elaborate show than the previous two, is doing marginally better, staying between $600,000 and $650,000 for the past four weeks in a row. 

A Beautiful Noise, with a roster of Neil Diamond hits employed to tell the singer-songwriter’s story, started strong out of the gate, topping $1 million regularly each week, but things have slowed in the past month and last week it dropped below the $800,000 level for the first time since it began its run. Some Like It Hot is the best performer of the new musical lot for the season, hovering in the $800,000 to $900,000 weekly range and not significantly rising or falling. In its first two full weeks of eight preview performances, New York, New York, which has yet to open, grossed $870,000 and $931,000, which are encouraging figures.

The $1,000,000 mark, once a notable threshold, is no magic number, especially when some musicals reportedly have running costs at that level. But it’s somewhat telling that in the current season, only & Juliet has consistently surpassed that number since the beginning of 2023. It’s the known quantities, the revivals which seem to have the lion’s share of momentum to carry them beyond that point, with Parade grossing more than $1 million weekly in the intimate Bernard B Jacobs Theatre, and, one block over at the larger Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, Sweeney Todd passed $1,700,000 each of the past two weeks. The retooled Camelot isn’t quite at that peak, but it’s close, even though it’s running at the subsidised Lincoln Center Theater where prices don’t typically rise quite as high as at commercial counterparts.

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