Theater lovers in New York City are being presented with quite the conundrum: pay rent, or see a Broadway show?
Eye-popping prices for tickets to see the hottest shows and biggest stars on stage are rivaling the cost of eggs for headline news—and they keep going up. It’s not just resale and scalped tickets that are fetching fees that will make your wallet grow legs and try to run away. The base prices that theaters and productions are charging for premium seats are higher than they’ve ever been before.
Jockeying for the last few dollars in your bank account are major celebrities hitting the stage, offering fans the chance to see their favorite People magazine cover stars live and in the flesh, as well as Broadway legends in splashy productions that musical obsessives wouldn’t soon miss—and therefore pay a pretty penny (RIP) to see.
But which celeb is winning the theater ticket gold rush? Curtain up on our highly sophisticated investigation.
A-listers like George Clooney (Good Night, and Good Luck); Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal (Othello); and Paul Mescal (A Streetcar Named Desire) are all currently on the boards. Freshly minted Oscar-winner Kieran Culkin is in a new mounting of Glengarry Glen Ross, while a few blocks away, his Succession co-star Sarah Snook is doing a one-woman production of The Portrait of Dorian Gray.
Not to be outdone, Fleabag and Ripley star Andrew Scott is doing a one-man production of Vanya, based on Uncle Vanya. And the starpower is cross-generational; heartthrob Nick Jonas is in the musical The Last Five Years, Glee alum Darren Criss is in Maybe Happy Ending, and former American Idol favorite Adam Lambert is currently the Emcee in Cabaret.
Theater legends are commanding top-dollar, too, with Audra McDonald (Gypsy), Bernadette Peters (Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends), and Idina Menzel (Redwood) serving as the Holy Trinity of “Holy Cow, It Costs How Much?!” And the breathless raves for the season’s buzziest productions have spiked prices to see Nicole Scherzinger in Sunset Blvd. and Tituss Burgess in Oh, Mary!.
Earlier this week, we tracked down what the top ticket cost was to see each of these stars at the evening performance on Saturday, Mar. 22. We looked at both what the theater charged for its most expensive ticket through its official website and what the highest price was for a resale ticket on Stubhub, including fees, at that moment.
Like any great piece of theater that warrants a second mortgage in order to afford to see, the results took us by surprise!
When it comes to baseline prices that theaters are charging, it’s perhaps expected that Othello co-stars Washington and Gyllenhaal come with the highest price tag: $921 for a premium seat. Next in line, Clooney is a downright bargain in comparison, at $799 for Good Night, and Good Luck. Culkin is right up there, though, with Glengarry Gary Ross at $724.50. (That production’s star value is bolstered by Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr also starring.)
But when it comes to shelling out the really, really big bucks, it’s not the movie stars slumming it on the Great White Way who are the draws, but the tried-and-true thespians themselves.
On the day we researched, it was Burgess, in his limited run of Oh, Mary!, who had the top resale price, at a whopping $3,052 with fees for the most expensive ticket on Stubhub. Not far behind him were the Tony-winning icons McDonald and Peters, with McDonald fetching $2,787 for Gypsy and Peters $2,469 for Old Friends. Joining them in the $2000+ club was Lambert; a ticket for Cabaret was going for $2,056.
Now, these resale prices fluctuate not just on a daily basis, but an hourly one; prices could be much less—or much more!—now than when we looked them up, and next week different stars could be commanding top-dollar compared to the ones right now. But the difference between the movie stars’ baseline ticket prices and the theater stars’ resale surge is fascinating to me. Theater lovers apparently want to see good theater, movie stars be damned, and are willing to pay for it.
And, for what it’s worth, these are obviously not average ticket prices. It is possible to see these productions for much, much cheaper. That is how I, someone who works in media (aka a Poor Person), sees shows—although it would be a stretch to call tickets affordable.
That said, if anyone would like to contribute to my fund to see Denzel in Othello, I accept Paypal, Venmo, and Zelle.
Additional reporting for this story by Clare Donaldson.
