Weekly sales for the Broadway musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch dropped a whopping 43% in the week following the departure of Neil Patrick Harris.
If anyone still thought star power wasn't a huge factor on the Great White Way, they can surely hear the final nail being driven into that coffin today. The drawing power of the "How I Met Your Mother" star became all too clear as Andrew Rannells stepped into the role of the singer with the botched sex change in the John Cameron Mitchell/Stephen Trask glam-rock musical.
Harris brought enormous buzz to the Broadway premiere of the one-time Off-Broadway hit. Fueled by his TV stardom and his jaw-dropping opening number at the 2013 Tony Awards, the actor became a bigger pop culture icon than ever in his first Broadway role in a decade.
His loss meant a huge drop in box office take for Hedwig. In the first week after he left, The Broadway League reported that sales dropped from $1,139,903 in the previous week to $648,738. The show, which has recouped its investment, had grossed over $1,000,000 every week since the beginning of June, with total grosses just over $20,000,000 as of this writing.
Those are big numbers, yes. But don't forget about the high prices of tickets to Broadway musicals these days. The average theatergoer paid $158.83 for a ticket to Hedwig during Harris's final week.
Broadway's overall week was down as well, but by a much less painful 10%, as Bullets Over Broadway and the Disney hit Newsies closed and Wicked and The Book of Mormon returned to eight-show-a-week schedules after stints at nine.
It's not as if Rannells is a nobody. Known to Broadway aficionados for playing "Elder Price" in The Book of Mormon for well over a year, and to HBO acolytes for "Girls," he has also appeared in Hairspray and Jersey Boys on Broadway, in the well-reviewed but short-lived TV sitcom "The New Normal" and in the movie "Bachelorette" with Kirsten Dunst.
Hedwig's producers can take comfort in the fact that even with that 43% drop in sales, they're filling 82% of the Belasco Theatre's capacity, a proportion many shows would envy. Part of the very big grosses of the Harris era came from higher-priced "premium" ticket sales the actor's star power enabled the producers to charge.
So as Neil Patrick Harris, temporary King of Broadway, relinquishes his crown, the future may still be pretty bright for Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
