Another opening, another Broadway show . . . but when?

By Ken Davenport

A week ago, I posted a blog that chronicled the “closing times” of Broadway shows. Just when did they happen? And if we knew when, could we figure out why? (Read that blog here.)

I got a bunch of emails asking us to do the same analysis on Broadway openings, so we did. We studied the number of Broadway openings over the last 32 years, month by month, and graphed them below.

We tweaked the way we looked at this data just a bit, and instead of looking at the number of openings, we looked at the percentage of openings, so that in case there was a major fluctuation of shows opening from year to year, the data would be consistent. (We went back and did the same thing for the Closing Study and found that there was very little change to the graph trend, by the way.)

Before I show you the pretty graphs, here is the Producer Perspective Summary of Broadway Openings:

In the past 32 years, Broadway has seen the most openings by month in April, followed by November, and then March.
The four months with the least number of openings are all in a row: June, July, August, and September.
During the past 32 years, the single month with the most openings was October of 1987, with 14.
In general, less shows are opening in January and February, and more are opening in March and April.
Months when shows tend to close follow a much more regular pattern than months when shows tend to open.

What trends do you see in the graphs below?