Welcome back to Tony Talk, a column in which Gold Derby contributors Sam Eckmann and David Buchanan offer Tony Awards analysis. On the heels of the news that Cats: The Jellicle Ball will shutter early, we analyze the structural factors working against the acclaimed production and comment on the state of the Broadway musical heading into the new season.
David Buchanan: Sam, we’re regrouping just a few days after the announcement that Cats: The Jellicle Ball will close on Aug. 8, only four months after its opening night and two months after the 2026 Tony Awards. This imaginative reinvention of the 1982 musical had tremendous word-of-mouth from its PAC NYC production in 2024 and was one of the most highly anticipated musical revivals of last Broadway season. When we first saw the remounting at the Broadhurst, we both sang its praises and argued that it had the unique ability to appeal to fans and skeptics of the original material alike by re-situating the show from its junkyard setting to the exuberant world of ballroom.
The news elicited a passionate public statement from Cats composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who bemoaned not only the closing of this unique production, but also the current state of Broadway, which he views as being financially unsustainable for new, daring works. “What is happening in front of all who care about the Great White Way breaks my heart,” he wrote. “It makes practically no financial sense to come to Broadway with things as they are. … Broadway is in dire danger of rivaling Hollywood’s empty soundstages with increasingly dark theaters.”
What do you make of the show’s premature closing and Webber’s warning about this broader crisis in New York theatre?
Sam Eckmann: It’s no secret that Cats: The Jellicle Ball was my favorite production from this recent Broadway season. I first saw it at PAC NYC and left that venue on an indescribable high. Reimagining this ’80s mega musical as a ballroom competition gives the show a renewed context and relevance, and the energetic performances turn the show into an explosion of joy.
By some miracle, the creative team was able to recapture the magic in their transition to a proscenium stage on Broadway. Cats had honestly never been my cup of tea, but after The Jellicle Ball, I couldn’t stop singing the songs and trying to recreate the thrilling vogueing choreography… well, in my head at least. My creaky knees would probably turn to dust if I attempted a true duck walk!
Needless to say, the closing announcement was devastating, but it was also not unexpected. It’s the latest example of how ballooning costs are shrinking the margins of Broadway shows to untenable levels. The Jellicle Ball was reportedly capitalized at $18 million, which is a relative bargain in a world where major Broadway musicals now regularly cost $25 million to produce. But even Cats‘ $18 million price tag leaves little room for error at the box office. While weekly operating costs never remain static, industry insiders have estimated that this production needed to rake in approximately $850,000 a week to cover those expenses.
If you include fees with that number, which easily add an additional $100,000 per week, then we can guess that The Jellicle Ball had a weekly breakeven point of just under $1 million. So far, the show’s weekly grosses have only met or surpassed this point in four weeks of the run. Cats’ highest gross is $1,033,755 for the week ending May 24, 2025. Most weeks saw the gross hovering around their breakeven point or sitting a bit underneath it. The numbers have noticeably dropped throughout July.
It wasn’t long ago that we use to look at the weekly Broadway grosses to see which shows joined the “million-dollar club” that week. But with ballooning costs in the past few years, if you aren’t in that million-dollar club, you’re in serious trouble. A scenario where most Broadway musicals have to maintain weekly grosses well over $1 million for multiple years in order to turn a profit is the dangerous territory that Webber mentions. The odds of success have plummeted.
It’s hard to know what Cats could have done differently in order to avoid this premature closing. It had stellar word of mouth, the best reviews of the season, and took home three Tony Awards. I do think that general audiences’ unfamiliarity with ballroom might have been a barrier that was too hard to overcome. It’s an underground scene largely created by Black and Brown queer and trans people, and as such is totally unknown to many tourists who make up a sizeable portion of Broadway ticket buyers.
Cats: The Jellicle Ball didn’t just have to be great, it had the added job of educating potential ticket buyers on what a ball is and why it’s fun to attend one. New York-area theatergoers, who are more likely to have some awareness of ball culture and are more willing to take a chance on an unknown property, seem to have embraced the show. But it seems it was too difficult to convince tourists to try out a new experience — and to pay top dollar for said experience — when they only have one or two slots during their trip for a Broadway show during their trip. Do you think there was anything else that could have turned the tides for them?
Buchanan: My short answer is no. The Jellicle Ball reads to me as a casualty of the structure and ballooning costs of the overall Broadway industry, through no fault of their own.
I do think there were a number of factors that held the show back from taking off in the way we might have hoped. First, although The Jellicle Ball is entirely different from earlier Cats productions, this is still Cats, and audiences, especially tourists, have had no shortage of opportunities to see the material on Broadway and beyond. The original 1982 production ran for nearly 18 years and 7,485 performances, and a conventional revival of the show opened just a decade ago and ran for a year.
We’ve seen with revivals like Gypsy that it is very hard to recoup or sustain a long run with multiple replacement casts once the show exhausts the local New York theatergoing base. It did seem like the production recently tried to lean into the nostalgia of the original, adopting the iconic title treatment in its marketing, but it just may be too hard to persuade folks to see another production of Cats, no matter how different and excellent the concept and staging may be.
Yes, The Jellicle Ball took home three well-deserved Tony Awards for Best Direction, Best Choreography, and Best Costume Design, but those categories unfortunately don’t easily translate into ticket sales. The bigger prize of Best Musical Revival — the one that arguably offers some opportunity for box-office lift — ultimately went to Ragtime in a very hotly contested race. The latter show is concluding its extended limited engagement on Aug. 16. Had Cats won that trophy instead of Ragtime, would Cats have run longer? Perhaps, but I’m skeptical that it would have made the difference between a limited versus multiyear run.
I also don’t think this is an easy production to translate on screen, whether via their performance on the Tony Awards or the smaller-scale numbers they’ve done on daytime and late night talk shows including The View, Good Morning America, and The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon. Of course, nothing ever compares to seeing a show in its Broadway venue, but this production especially has cultivated such a magnetic environment in the Broadhurst, from the lighting design to the thrust runway stage to the thrilling audience response, and that magic just cannot translate as well in the small soundstages on television.
Beyond The Jellicle Ball, we’ve clearly seen a big chill on Broadway across new musicals and musical revivals. Even the gangbusters 2024-25 season that boasted 14 new musicals and six revivals saw many those shows shutter unexpectedly and swiftly under the weight of the economy and an overabundance of choices. As a result, we had a significant constriction of the number of shows this past season, with only six new musicals and four musical revivals. Of these shows, The Queen of Versailles and Beaches closed quickly and even Chess, which started out with much box-office enthusiasm, opted to shutter when Lea Michele left the production rather than try to stay the course with replacement Joanna “JoJo” Levesque. There’s no question we’re in a precarious place for tuners.
Looking ahead, we already have five new musicals slated for 2026-27: Wanted, Galileo, Dolly: A True Original Musical, Paddington The Musical, and Warriors. There are also some high-profile musical revivals on deck, including The Fantastics, Evita, The Full Monty, and The Sound of Musical, not to mention those we previously discussed that haven’t officially confirmed a theater and opening date. Do you feel cautiously optimistic about next season?
Eckmann: I definitely feel optimistic for the artistry that will be on stage this season. But I fear that many of these productions will face the same financial challenges that befell The Jellicle Ball.
It’s true that the 2024-25 season was filled to the brim with musicals, but only one of those productions recouped its investment: Just in Time, the Bobby Darrin bio-musical, which originally starred Jonathan Groff. Seven other new musicals — including Boop! and Real Women Have Curves — shuttered early. Death Becomes Her ran until just a month ago, but the show’s $30 million price tag meant it closed at a loss.
Arguably the two buzziest musicals of that season were revivals: Gypsy starring Audra McDonald and Sunset Boulevard starring Nicole Sherzinger. But for all their press and accolades, they too failed to recoup their investments. The only musicals from the 2024-25 season still running are Buena Vista Social Club, Operation Mincemeat, and Tony champ Maybe Happy Ending. It’s possible that these remaining shows could become profitable, but current sales indicate that recoupment is a long ways away for all three.
The financial impact of one season directly impacts the next. When so many musicals fail financially, the usual pool of investors tighten their purse strings. As a result, we wind up with the measly six-musical lineup from the 2025-26 season. There were plenty of other shows hoping to make the move to Broadway, but none could secure funding. Unless there is a major shift in the industry, I predict this trend will continue for the next few years.
This brings me to Webber’s plea for all of the major parties of Broadway to work together to find a solution. Our industry has a unique financial structure that isn’t found in any other sector. Three organizations own the lion share of Broadway’s 41 theaters: ATG Entertainment, the Nederlander Organization, and the Shubert Organization. In most cases, weekly rent for a Broadway house includes a set fee plus 5% to 7% of the box office. The other controlling party are the producers, who secure financing for a production and shepherd it into a Broadway house owned by one of the three aforementioned landlords.
But here’s the rub: although these two parties must work together to make theater happen, the core function of their jobs are diametrically opposed. From a strictly business perspective, a landlord’s prime interest in is maximizing rent, since that is their chief source of profit. On the flip side, a producer’s core objective is to minimize expenses in order to create a wider margin and a higher probability of paying back investors. In an era when the cost of every single line item in the budget has exploded, and where the Broadway tax credit has evaporated, the math between these two parties is clearly not working.
Producers formerly understood the odds of success for a financial show were one in five. In the past couple years, those odds have become one in twenty. If you saw those odds in the Gold Derby prediction center, you probably wouldn’t bet on them.
I’m not saying that this is an easy fix with just one issue to solve. For instance, Broadway also desperately needs new methods of reaching more diverse audience members and driving up demand. How are we communicating to folks who have never seen a live performance before and convincing them that this unique art form is worthy of the price of admission? But before we can think about different marketing tactics, we have to address the financial strains at the core of the industry. If the margin of error at the box office remains this thin, then ingenious works like Cats: The Jellicle Ball will continue to shutter before they have time to find an audience.
