Wicked Gershwin Theatre

The Gershwin Theatre amazingly enough has one show playing all week long but yet is a Top 5 venue weekly! The event is none other than Wicked! Wicked tops the secondary ticket market charts throughout the year and has sold more tickets than any other Broadway event over the last several years. Click on any of the links below to check out the Gershwin Theatre and Wicked.

Gershwin Theatre Seating Chart

Wicked NYC Tickets

Wicked Has Broadway and America Seeing Green

Opening October 30, 2003 to mixed reviews by the critics, no one ever expected Wicked the musical to reach the financial success it has as of June 2009.

In fact, the only green director Joe Mantello and Universal Pictures originally caught a glimpse of was the skin of Elphaba, the intelligent and misunderstood character, who later becomes the Wicked Witch of the West.

Elphaba was born green due to her mother’s ingestion of an elixir while becoming pregnant.

In a struggling economy, Wicked continues to post large box office numbers that have all the founding fathers of this brilliant production seeing the color of Elphaba’s skin!

According to Playbill.com, Wicked has averaged over 1.56 million dollars per week at the Gershwin Theatre on Broadway for the last several weeks. The theater has 1809 seats and has been at 100% capacity in that time frame.

The show also sells an average over $300K in merchandise in a seven day period.

The Broadway production set a record for the highest weekly gross in Broadway box office history for the week ending December 30, 2007 taking in a whopping total of $1,839,950.

Wicked has also enjoyed success on the road.

In fact, the same week the Broadway record was shattered, the show grossed $2.29 million in St. Louis, $1.94 million in Los Angeles and $1.41 million in Chicago. All seven worldwide productions gathered a total of $11.2 million that week.

Most recently, Wicked took in over $3.86 million in Chrysler Hall during a three week run. The production netted the city of Norfolk, Virginia another $2.24 million in event-related audience spending outside of ticket sales. Fifty-nine jobs were created during this period, including musicians and people hired to be part of the crew.

Wicked is the number one ticket sold in the secondary market.

According to the largest broker network in the world, TicketNetworkDirect, the average price of a ticket in the secondary market is over $175.

The price of the average ticket on Broadway in the primary market is less than $110.

Overall, this amazing musical has stimulated the economy wherever it has played. Hundreds of thousands of fans have enjoyed this production for almost six years.

In an economy that tends to make the world see red, it is nice to see cities like New York, San Francisco, Memphis and San Antonio seeing green.

The “Wicked” credit mainly goes to the show stopping performance of a well written character and a bad choice her mother made while she was pregnant!

photo: AP

sources: HamptonRoads.com, TicketNetworkDirect and PlayBill.com.

The Top 5 Reasons Adam Lambert Left the Cast of Wicked

5. He wanted to star in “Hairspray“.

4. As the understudy, he was tired of carrying the clipboard and signaling in the plays.

3. The conductor of the orchestra had enough of him screaming the high notes and drowning out the flautist.

2. He refused to kiss Elphaba and tried to kiss Boq instead.

1. Madame Morrible told him he would win American Idol in 4 years!

Event Ticket Market; Bull or Bare?

Marty Rice owns two small businesses in Mansfield, Ohio and owning a successful company in 2009 is much more difficult than it was even a few short years ago. His corrugated box company, Mr. Box Plus, has seen a dip in sales of about 11% to start the year after posting solid numbers in 2008. Most companies are experiencing similar results as America is faced with one of the toughest economic downturns in history.

Marty owns season tickets to the Cleveland Indians and Cleveland Cavaliers. With the tough economic times, one would think Marty has stopped attending games and sold his tickets to make up for the loss of income.

Or has he?

Marty splits a dugout suite Progressive Field with 6 other guys. He says that everyone of them is back for the 2009 season.  At a cost of $248,000 this year, Marty’s portion of the package is over $41,000. That doesn’t even include food and beverages on game day. No one especially wants to miss the dessert cart. I have personally been in the suite and win or lose; the dessert cart is a highlight of the location! The seats are so close to the field you can even spit on the on deck hitter. I know my kid tried two years ago!

Marty hasn’t given up his Cavs seats either. In fact, Marty or his clients attended all 41 Cavaliers home games in 2008-09. According to ESPN.Go.Com, the Cavaliers averaged 20,010 fans per night this season, slightly down from their 2007-08 showing of 20,465 per night. Marty says he noticed a great turnout at every Cavs game he attended, “the place was pretty much full every time,” he stated.

So, if Marty feels this way, how about the rest of America? Are fans no longer attending events because they can’t afford it? Not according to Harmon Howe, whose job it is to manage ticket partners for the world’s largest secondary market exchange, TicketNetwork Exchange™. “What’s happened is the average price of a transaction has dropped from last year by about 15%,” stated Howe, “the number of transactions has gone up substantially, about 75%.”

“Instead of going to Disney World for a week, parents are taking their children to a kid’s concert,” said Howe. Although, he really feels economic pressure has pushed down the price of a seat, he offered this, “fans don’t want to miss the opportunity to see an artist or musical group that may not tour for several years or never again.” U2 and Aerosmith are two very popular groups that fit this category and have been very profitable in the secondary market.

Carol-Ann Rudy of www.TicketNews.com supports Howe in her article written for the website on April 22, 2009. Rudy cites Broadway sales are up over $26 million versus last year at this time. Wicked continues to hold the top spot in all of secondary market ticket sales. According to the sites ranking system, the popular musical has more market share than the four shows ranked directly below the show combined!

A USA Today poll launched in March asked, “How will the economic downturn affect your sports consumption?” As of April 28th, 48% of responders say they will, “attend fewer events and watch more TV” and 36% of pollsters say the economy will have no effect at all!

So, despite an almost bare economy where company revenue is down, Marty Rice will jump into his 2005 Chrysler 300M, head up I-71 to Quicken Loans Arena and follow the Cavaliers throughout the rest of their playoff run. LeBron James is the favorite to win the MVP award and his team had the best regular season record at home this year in the NBA. According to Marty, it’s worth the money he will spend to sit in Club Section 124. Yep, Marty thinks it would be “bull” to sell his playoff tickets or any other ticket he owns at this point. He feels, “the excitement of the playoffs has overridden the economy.”