Box office is down 10 to 15 percent on average. And generally, I would say, across my group of theaters, there’s much less international tourism. Costs on both sides of the Atlantic have gone up, whereas the box office hasn’t.
Just under about $950,000 net now, which is about $100,000 more than it was pre-Covid. And, as a veteran of long-running shows, I’ve found there comes a point with the greatest show where the only thing you can do is to tell people it isn’t going to be there indefinitely, which people always assume, with a long-runner, it is. We watched it through the spring and summer, and it became obvious that a show of this expense - because you know “Phantom” is more expensive than virtually any other show around, particularly the long-running shows - we were going to continue losing. Once we got through the first few months (after the reopening), we were getting to a situation where we were having regular running losses. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. “It’s always been one of my mantras throughout my long career: There’s an art to closing a show, as well as opening one.” “You don’t want to run a great show into the ground,” he said. In a telephone interview Saturday, Mackintosh, who is 75 years old and is based in London, explained the decision. (It also prompted a rush of ticket sales - nearly $2 million worth in the first 24 hours.)
The show will continue to run in London, and in productions elsewhere around the world, and it could return to Broadway at some point, but the closing of the current production is nonetheless the end of an era, and the news brought an outpouring of shock and sadness from fans of many ages.
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