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.