There are essentially two things that dictate the cost of theater tickets. The first is the actual cost involved in producing a show. Tickets need to be priced to give investors a reasonable chance to recoup their investment assuming that a show is successful. I doubt many people would invest in a show if they knew that if the show sold every seat in the house in a given week, without a penny is discounts, the show revenue still wouldn’t cover its weekly nut, let alone begin to recover the actual cost of mounting the show to begin with. So many things contribute to high running costs, especially in musicals. You all know this.
And the second thing is simply supply and demand. Hit shows will charge what the traffic will bear, which is how premium tickets first came into being. Pure and simple, it’s a business, and producers will do what they can to make money and return as much as they can to investors who will then, hopefully, invest in their next show. |
