“Closing time! You don’t have to go home . . .”

By Ken Davenport

Sing along with me!

“. . . but you can’t stay here!”

If you work in the theater, then odds are you’ve closed down a few bars late at night/early in the am and heard that song.

With the rash of show closings, or announcements of closings, over the last six weeks, (thanks in part to the tremendous amount of product on the street) I’ve been thinking about “closing times” a lot.

Like . . . when do the most shows close?

And, more importantly, has that changed over time? Are there trends that Producers like you and I should be aware of as we decide when to open our shows, or are there months when our shows are more vulnerable than others? (Concentrated closings in a certain month should indicate that business immediately following that period would be slow, don’t you think?)

To get a few of the answers to the above, I went data diving again. This time, I took along with my trusty sidekick, employee, and Broadway Historian, Jennifer Tepper. We dug out the # of closings in each month over the past 32 years, graphed them out, (I love a graph) and came up with a few interesting takeaways.

The graphs for each month are below, and here is the Producer Perspective Summary of our findings:

In the past 32 years, Broadway has seen the most closings by month in January, followed by June, and then May.
October sees the least number of closings. The average number of closings that happen in October is less than 1/3 of the number that happen in January.
During the past 32 years, the single month with the most closings was January of 2009. (Financial crisis, anyone?)
The number of shows that close in February, March, and April appear to be generally decreasing, while more shows are closing in January, June, and July.

Here go those graphs!