“While New York City is getting stronger every day and ticket sales are slowly improving, theater tourists and, especially for our show, the family audience have not returned as quickly as we expected,” said Kevin McCollum, the show’s producer in a statement. Thursday. “Unfortunately, it’s not possible to run the show without those sales, especially if you capitalize three times with Broadway economics.”
Other Broadway productions have also struggled in this new landscape. A critically acclaimed revival of “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” which had struggled at the box office, announced last week it would close on May 22, just a month after opening and three months ahead of schedule. planned. But on Thursday, after receiving seven Tony Award nominations and a social media campaign to sponsor women of color with some gifted tickets, it announced it will now play for two more weeks, through June 5.
Last week “Mrs. Doubtfire” grossed $477,132, and the audience was only 69 percent full. Still, the show continues with a UK engagement, which McCollum said will play for a month from September 2 in England’s Manchester; a US tour is also scheduled for October 2023.
Years in development and capitalized at $17 million, the production had only gotten three preview performances by March 2020 when Broadway shut down. After a 19-month hiatus, “Mrs. Doubtfire” resumed previews last October and opened December 5, supported by a nearly $10 million grant from the Small Business Administration. It opened to lukewarm reviews — and a pan in The New York Times – just as Omicron started to cause the number of cases to rise again.
Then, in a startling example of the financial damage caused by the pandemic shutdown, McCollum decided to shut down its production for several months, saying he saw no other way to save it. The musical comedy closed temporarily on January 10 and was scheduled to reopen on March 14, but later postponed its reopening to April 14. The closure cost 115 people their jobs for that period.
