Andrew Lloyd Webber Sounds Alarm on Broadway’s ‘Dire Danger’ After a Cats: The Jellicle Ball Closing Notice
Cats: The Jellicle Ball stunned the Broadway community July 13 with a closing notice for August 8, making for a shockingly short run for a production that has been well attended, incredibly well reviewed, and even won three major Tony Awards (including Best Direction of a Musical for Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch and Choreography for Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons). And Cats writer Andrew Lloyd Webber says it’s a symptom of a problem he’s seen coming for some time now.
“The truth is that, for any show, it makes practically no financial sense to come to Broadway with things as they are,” says Lloyd Webber in a statement posted to Instagram. “Creators, writers, and directors have been forced to take minimal royalties from new shows, often surviving on a fixed weekly fee rather than a royalty. It makes it impossible for young creatives to make a living from theatre alone.” He goes on to acknowledge that Broadway’s long-running warhorses (a list that used to include Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, and notably the 1982 original production of Cats) are making money, while pointing out that Broadway cannot survive on the backs of a small handful of shows alone.
But the Evita writer also has a call to action. “As someone who is still as in love with Broadway as I was when I was a teenager, I beg the theatre owners, unions, and producers to come together urgently to address what is a crisis coming to a head,” he writes. “Broadway is in dire danger of rivaling Hollywood’s empty soundstages with increasingly dark theatres.”
Read the full statement below.
Lloyd Webber’s remarks join a rapidly increasing list of similar commentary from many in the industry, including several past statements from Lloyd Webber himself. Even Broadway League President Jason Laks acknowledged the problem in The New York Times last fall, a piece that notably published amidst the League’s active negotiations with Actors’ Equity Association for new standard base Broadway actor and stage manager contracts.
This current Cats revival may stand as one of the starkest examples of what that group is talking about, succumbing to a short run after being well received and even being well sold—the production has yet to report attendance of less than 85% at the Broadhurst. Whatever the causes of the current financial moment, the new Broadway productions that seem to be most reliably finding success have overwhelmingly become almost exclusively A-list star-driven straight plays, with many musicals not able to survive long enough to find an audience at ticket prices that allow for profit.
Broadway has always been an extraordinarily risky investment, with financial failures always far outweighing the successes. But according to Lloyd Webber and many others around him, our current moment is something worse, and deeply concerning. Of this season’s new musical productions, Beaches, The Queen of Versailles, and Chess have already closed after struggling at the box office, and of this season’s musical survivors—Schmigadoon!, The Lost Boys, Titaníque, Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), Ragtime, and The Rocky Horror Show—none have yet emerged as major box-office hits.
