College Honors Program

Date of Creation

5-2024

Document Type

Thesis

First Advisor

Melissa Boyle

Abstract

On March 12, 2020 New York’s Broadway theaters halted performances due to the COVID-19 pandemic. After a year and a half of closure, Broadway finally reopened in August 2021, however, the market was drastically different from its pre-shutdown state. In the midst of a global pandemic, new productions faced increased challenges when trying to establish themselves on the Broadway stage, and even old productions struggled to recoup losses. In this paper, multiple regression analysis and a Cox proportional hazards model were used to test whether a production’s pre-shutdown longevity impacted its success after Broadway reopened. It was found that productions that had existed before the shutdown (“old”) had higher weekly grosses, average ticket prices, and percent capacity of theaters compared to productions that were new after the shutdown. These old productions, however, had lower attendance. Further, there was little evidence to suggest that the actual length of pre-shutdown longevity, as measured in number of pre-shutdown performances, had any effect on production success. Through the hazard model, it was also found that old productions were less likely to survive compared with productions that were new after the shutdown.

Comments

Reader: Robert Baumann

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