19 July 2026 - 1:00pm
Broadway is in “dire danger”, the renowned composer Andrew Lloyd Webber said this week, as his revival Cats: The Jellicle Ball closed after just five months. Despite winning three Tony awards, it was undone by the costs of putting on a musical in New York’s theatre district.
The only conclusion we can draw, then, is that Lloyd Webber is right — not right in a broad sense, but in an acute sense. Theatre, whether musical or drama, has almost entirely ceased to work as a profession that can support practitioners through royalties or reward risk-taking investors; costs always seem to run ahead of ticket sales.
The supposition here is multifold: it implies that Broadway is too beholden to scale, and also that it has experienced mission drift and gigantism. Some shows can gamble on stars and maintain profitability — such as Every Brilliant Thing starring Daniel Radcliffe — but a handful of box office hits are not enough to sustain writers, directors and actors.
“How can the next generation build a life in theatre under those conditions?” Lloyd Webber wrote online. And this is almost certainly the right question to ask. Broadway has already concentrated its bets on Hollywood-adjacent stories, such as Stranger Things: The First Shadow, and old favourites. One would be hard-pressed to name a time when something new, raw or surprising — something economic in practice and grand in spirit — emerged. The machine churns for almost no purpose but to pay back enough of its investors to attract new investors into the game.
This speaks to a wider trend. Broadway is now experiencing something of a paradox: the highest-grossing collective season in its history — $1.9 billion, high capacity, high average ticket prices — even while shows die and fail to recoup. Recoupment rates are running between 19 and 20%, meaning that 80% of shows are losing money.
The total lack of breadth in Broadway’s portfolio — in the Twenties, it hosted well over 200 shows per year; today the number is typically around 40 — means, to Lloyd Webber’s point, that a very narrow band of creators, investors, and performers are being paid consistently. Theatre makers have almost no chance of escaping the precariat unless they find a way to join Broadway’s elite unions early in their careers.
Today, there’s a theatre industry but not a theatre ecosystem. And there’s more talent than is being rewarded financially, which leads only to increased competition for scraps, clout, and attention among the off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway have-nots. All of this is morbid and undignified.
What this signals, too, is that Broadway is about prestige and access laundering. Gifted artists — whether actors, directors, writers, or designers — have no hope of supporting themselves through work on Broadway unless they have already had success and bring followers and money with them. The industry is completely unwilling to take chances on great unknowns, while great knowns are delivering fitfully at best. Lloyd Webber notes that Broadway is headed the way of Hollywood, which has the same problems. The system spends recklessly on what it perceives to be sure bets, still losing, while refusing to offer its audiences options outside narrow aesthetic, cultural and ideological bands.
Theatre has a humanistic role to play in finding and nurturing talent that can illuminate dynamic aspects of a whole civilisation. Consider the latter half of the last century alone: August Wilson, Stephen Sondheim, Edward Albee, Tony Kushner. It is not obvious that the current system could find, fund, or support raw talents like this today.
To those who believe that it’s merely healthy for society to employ people to craft and sustain beautiful things, the present arrangement should be alarming. Broadway now employs people to maintain the machine, not to conjure the beautiful, entertaining things for which the machine was originally built. Strangely, it is the behaviour of a system that wants to collapse because it no longer knows what or who it is for.
