I wrote a post two weeks ago called “What Do You Do When Your Show Closes?” 26 years, four closing notices, and the question you need to answer before you take this on as a career.
A journalist from The Hollywood Reporter found it. She reached out and we talked for twenty minutes. I could’ve talked for an hour.
I’m quoted in the piece that ran a few days ago: “Cats’ Closing: Is It Curtains for Broadway Musicals?”
A few things I said made it into print.
“A lot of my colleagues have never had a show that has lasted more than a year.”
The reporter wrote:
For his part, Craddock, the drummer in Cats, says the industry and his job security has felt increasingly unstable post-pandemic.
Because of this he started a business educating other musicians about Broadway’s financial model, and encouraging them to take more gigs outside of the industry, to learn how to play more styles of music and find other revenue streams in order to hedge against the instability.
The piece ended with:
“I didn’t know how much longer it could last since it’s a new show,” Craddock says. “Even though people that have come to see it love it, the energy is electric inside the theater, and the band is great, the vibe in the pit is great, but there just weren’t enough people to keep this afloat.”
That’s not a complaint. That’s just how it is for most new musicals now.
Since the closing notice, Andrew Lloyd Webber has been talking publicly about what’s actually broken. He said our production, capitalized at 18 million dollars, had a weekly operating cost of more than 1 million dollars. That means even with solid houses, we were still losing money every single week just to keep the lights on.
And here’s something our own producer told the company directly, in a meeting before the closing announcement:
“The truth is we’re not meeting the expenses of the show each week, and we haven’t since the first day we started.”
We were playing to good houses, we won three Tony Awards, critics loved us, and the show still never once cleared its own weekly cost. That’s not a knock on the show. That’s just what the math looked like every single week.
That's the part that's hardest to explain to people outside this business. It's not about talent or reviews. It's about money moving in places most of us never think to look, money that decides whether your show survives, whether your next gig exists, whether this business holds up long enough for you to build a career in it. So over the next few posts, I'm pulling it apart. Starting with who really owns it.
Here’s what’s coming:
Part 1 — Who Owns Broadway? The air rights deal I didn’t know existed until this week, and where that money actually goes.
Part 2 — Why anyone still invests. The odds of losing your money on a Broadway show are brutal. People keep writing checks anyway. I wanted to know why.
Part 3 — The union question. What looked like a PR move by the Broadway League turned out to be something else: two sides protecting different things — the show and the person — and never quite talking to each other.
Part 4 — Where new work should start. Should a musical launch on Broadway, or arrive there only after it’s proven itself somewhere else?
Part 5 — Who actually matters. Who gets treated like part of the show, and who doesn’t, no matter how many shows they’ve been part of.
Available for iOS and Android
READ: ‘Cats’ Closing: Is It Curtains for Broadway Musicals? - ‘Jellicle Ball’ shutting down is sending alarm bells across the Great White Way as producers contend with rising costs and changing audience behaviors.
READ: Only Andrew Lloyd Webber is brave enough to tell the truth about Broadway - Major musicals are going bust at New York’s biggest theatres because the economic model is broken. But there is a way to fix it
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