BWW Blog: Peter Wayner - Broadway Ticket Prices: Where Does the Money Go?

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Many people look at the Broadway ticket prices and wonder where the money goes. I did and that's why I wrote Attention Must Be Paid, But for $800?, a book that looks deeply at the budgets of the 1949 and 2012 productions of Death of a Salesman.

Is the answer simple? Not at all. After digging in archives and talking with sources, I found the budgets for both productions. The elaborate spreadsheets showed where the money was going broken down by section. It was easy to work through the numbers but that didn't tell the whole story.

The most noticeable change is scale. While both productions used the same script and the set design, the newer version is bigger in almost every way. The production is more elaborate and the backstage is filled with a larger crew. A glance at the budgets shows just how this changed. The 1949 budget could be summarized in one sheet of paper but the budget from 2012 took a half dozen. The budget for the 2012 version is filled with many items that weren't mentioned in the 1949 budget. In many cases, teams today do the work that used to be accomplished by one or two people. The production ends up being more elaborate and ornate thanks to the contributions of all of these people.

The biggest change, though, is publicity. It's much harder for producers today to gather an audience and they need to advertise more widely than ever. The 1949 production made do with a few newspaper ads and a sign in Times Square (just $50); the 2012 production advertised in newspapers, on the Internet, through direct mail and, of course, on television. This budget was much, much bigger.

In the end, this means that Broadway style productions need to be bigger than ever just to sustain the cost of publicity. The smaller shows that try to get by can't generate enough revenues to pay for the production.

Peter Wayner is the author of more than 15 books including Attention Must Be Paid, But For $800?, a deep exploration of just how much it cost to produce Death of a Salesman in 1949 and 2012.