What Makes a Broadway Theatre Desirable?

Last week Hell’s Kitchen, located at the Shubert Theatre, announced that they would close on February 22. Aside from the unfortunate news that is for all who work on the show, it stands to wonder what might take that theatre in the next couple of months, and could that happen before the Tony Awards deadline? Furthermore, why is the Shubert Theatre in particular considered so desirable? 

There are a number of factors that play into a theatre being considered “desireable”, though many of them have to do with the technical specifications of the theatre itself. The Ambassador Theatre for example, home of Chicago for the last 23 years, is on a much smaller building footprint than many of its peer theatrs of similar capacity, which negatively impacts the amount of space the stage and wings have in the thetare. That theatre, though it may not be desirable for a larger show, works well for the relatively minimal staging of Chicago, which is why it has run there since 2003. 

If you look at a list of theatres ranked by occupancy over the last 25 years, you will see many expected results. Theatres like the Richard Rogers and the Eugene O’Neil, home of Hamilton and The Book of Mormon respectively, place very high up on this list. So does Disney’s theatre, the New Amsterdam, which has only programmed three shows in the last 25 years, the second fewest behind only the Majestic’s two. Conventional wisdom suggests that the ideal theatre has 2 seating tiers (no balcony), and is located on the west side of Broadway. And while that by and large lines up with the numbers over the years, with a couple of outliers, the vast majority of Broadway theatres fit that mold anyways...

Only six theatres total are located east of Broadway, and an additional five theatres located west of Broadway have third seating tier. And numbers do back that up, on average since 2000 theatres have had a show playing about 75% of the time. For theatres with three seating tiers, that number drops to 67% of the time. East of Broadway? 61%. Three seating tiers often have poor sightlines in the uppermost tier, which affects how much can be charged for tickets. It is the theatres with less than 1100 seats and which have three seating tiers that rank the lowest. It is worth noting that two of the top five theatres by occupancy rate however are three-tiered houses, indicating that it may be somewhat less important.

The theaters that mostly house plays also rank fairly low, which is logical given the somewhat lesser commercial appeal of plays compared to musicals. Theatres like the Barrymore and the Music Box and the Booth all had significantly below average occupancy rates, mostly due to the majority of their offering being plays over the past 25 years. 

But the lowest occupancy rate for any theatre this century is the James Earl Jones, formerly known as the Cort Theatre, followed closely by the Belasco and the Longacre Theatres, each having tenants less than 50% of the time. Both the Belasco and the James Earl Jones have undergone renovations during that time, which shuttered the theatre for more than a year. However, both theatres have seen higher occupancy rates since then, more than likely because of these renovations. Maybe Happy Ending is the second longest running show in the Belasco since 2000, only behind the 2014 revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and it is only in the last few months that the Belasco overtook the Jones. 

On the flip side which are the most desirable theatres? The easy answer is theatres that have long-running shows, like the Gershwin Theatre with Wicked or the Minskoff with The Lion King. But there are a few interesting outlier theatres. One is the Al Hirschfeld, which has exclusively programmed musicals since 2000, one of only a small handful of theatres that can claim that, and they have been occupied 89% of the time, ranking 6th overall. There are a few reasons this could be, though the Al Hirschfeld is by no means a small theatre, its 1400 max seating capacity puts it a peg below Broadway's largest theatres, making it less of a challenge to fill to max capacity each week. This also means they have lower minimums for orchestra sizes, and fewer ushers required, etc, all while being located west of Broadway, and incidentally the only theatre located west of 8th Avenue. 

The other major outlier is the Shubert Theatre, which is the only theatre to be occupied more than 90% of the time, notably while also not having a show that ran for more than 5 years. The Shubert Theatre is the flagship theatre of The Shubert Organization (fitting), and they take great care to ensure that their marquee theatre has a tenant whenever possible. This makes the question of what happens now even more poignant. The Shubert Theatre has had a tenant every spring dating back to at least 1950, and rarely has it sat empty for more than about 9-10 weeks at a time. Incidentally that is the exact time between Hell’s Kitchen’s final performance and the Tony deadline on April 27. Regardless of if there is a tenant or not come April for the Shubert Theatre, history will be made. 

Check out the full list of theatres ranked by how often they are occupied below (non-profit theatres are not included for our purposes)