Long Islanders' Broadway attendance hits record low

Long Islanders are giving fewer and fewer regards to Broadway.

Even as overall attendance is hitting post-pandemic highs, the share of theatergoers from Long Island hit a quarter-century low last year — an estimated 4.3% of the overall audience — for the second year in a row, according to the latest-available statistics provided to Newsday by The Broadway League, the industry’s trade group. By comparison, Long Islanders were 12% in the 2002-2003 season.

"Like a lot of facets of the live-entertainment industry, we’re continuing to see people enjoying streaming. People love the couch. People working from home. And I think that’s a trend that was exacerbated, or heightened, since the pandemic," said league president Jason Laks.

Staying at home

Long Islanders, Laks said, are like other metropolitan-area suburbanites — residents of northern New Jersey as well as Rockland and Westchester counties — who are coming into the city less because of work-from-home policies, particularly midweek. Suburban attendance overall, 12.8%, is at a low point, according to the league's most recent demographic report.

"It’s a struggle of us against the couch suburbwide," Laks said.

What remains unclear is why suburbanites would be more prone to being couch potatoes than New York City residents, who were 20.5% of the Broadway audience in the latest statistics, and 21.7% the year before, the highest share since at least 2006-2007, when it was 22.4%.

Northern New Jersey residents were 5.9%, and Westchester/Rockland, 2.6%. Foreign tourists were 21.3%, and 45.4% were from the United States but outside the metropolitan area.

After Manhattan, Long Island used to be the most common residence of Broadway theatergoers. In the 2008-2009 season, for example, Nassau County was the second most common and Suffolk the third. A decade earlier, in 1998-1999, suburbanites were 35.6% of admissions.

The league's latest report, covering the 2023-2024 season, shows that suburbanites are more likely to attend plays, which tell a story primarily through spoken dialogue, whereas tourists prefer musicals. Audiences at new productions also were more local than for long-running ones.

It’s not just Long Islanders’ share of the audience that has hit quarter-century lows, but also Long Islanders’ total number of admissions.

Extrapolating from audience surveys that yield the report, there were about 530,000 Broadway admissions of Long Islanders.

In the 2001-2002 season, more than twice as many admissions — roughly 1.15 million — were Long Islanders as nowadays, according to a Newsday analysis.

Since at least the 1950s, the Broadway industry has blamed technological advances like television for encroaching on theater audiences, who in turn complain about ticket prices and traffic.

Amid high grosses, money troubles

The most recent season was the top-grossing recorded in Broadway history, and the second-best attended, with 14.7 million tickets, according to a league news release. But some shows are having trouble making money, especially musicals. Not one of the musicals that opened last season had made a profit as of September, according to The New York Times.

On a recent Wednesday, as theatergoers scurried to make matinees, Susan Ding, of Woodmere, who works in Manhattan at an investment bank, and her daughter, Aimee Ding, of Massapequa, a veterinarian, were heading to the ABBA-based musical "Mamma Mia!"

Susan Ding, who said she used to see one or two shows a year, now goes to the theater much less frequently, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic. At first she couldn’t remember exactly when her family had gone to Broadway before this year and finally recalled it was around 2015 for "Hamilton," and, she said, that was because her husband knows the mother of playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda "so we were able to get tickets."

"We used to go more often, but since COVID we haven’t, and part of it is there haven’t been a lot of plays that we wanted to see," she said, recalling past trips to see "Wicked," "Phantom of the Opera" and "Cats."

"It’s tough to do in the evening, I find, at 7, 8 o’clock at night," she said. "Especially in Long Island, if you’re not driving in, you have to take the train, so you’re not getting home till midnight."

Bringing back suburbanites

Broadway has long been a draw for people on Long Island — which Newsday in 1959 said might just be "the Suburban Sahara of Culture."

Nevertheless, Broadway has long fretted about how to draw more suburbanites.

Dating to at least the 1950s, Broadway has experimented with earlier curtain times for certain evening performances — 7 o’clock or 7:30 instead of the traditional 8:30 or later; Ira Gershwin even wrote a 1934 play called "Life Begins at 8:40" — to draw suburban audiences wary of getting home late.

The experiment had mixed success, and at one point in the 1960s, the curtain times were reverted back. Today, some shows are earlier in the evening. "Oh, Mary!" for example, does a 5 p.m. Saturday show.

In the late 1990s, Broadway studied how to draw in more suburbanites — particularly families with kids — as the city types who had been Broadway's traditional target audience were moving to places like Long Island, according to Jed Bernstein, Broadway League president from 1995 to 2006.

A child-friendly Broadway

In a resulting program called Kids’ Night on Broadway, which continues once or twice a year, children and teens are admitted free when a parent buys a ticket; certain Theater District restaurants put together children's menus and special food deals; and parking garages offer discounts.

"So each and every excuse, if you will, for, ‘we would love to otherwise bring our kids, but we can’t because of this, because of this, because of this,’ we tried to address those things," said Bernstein, now an NYU adjunct professor teaching arts marketing and also producing director at Theatre Aspen in Colorado.

In the aftermath of 9/11, tourism plummeted, and suburbanites were key in helping keep Broadway afloat.

Laks, the current league president, said the organization is examining how to reverse the trend of record-low suburban attendance rates and "remind people how easy it is to come into New York and see something."

This past August, Susan Ding got tickets for her husband’s birthday to the Bobby Darin jukebox musical "Just in Time." Awed by how the theater had been recreated as a swanky nightclub, Ding remembered how much she liked going to Broadway and hopes to go more often.

"I was thinking, ‘Let’s start this up again.’ Something fun to do," she said.

Waiting to buy tickets at the TKTS discount kiosk to see “Mamma Mia!” on a recent Wednesday after driving into the city were friends Mary Papadopoulos, 75, of Bethpage, and Stacey Black, 64, of Sayville, who said they’ve been going less often these days to Broadway even though, as Black put it, “we’re theater buffs.”

The duo blamed ticket cost and traffic.

Crime concerns

For Papadopoulos, who’s been patronizing Broadway "forever," there was also the pandemic and now fears of crime.

"COVID was one reason, and then I’m just a little afraid, a little skittish, in the city. Yeah, I am. I’ve gotten a little bit nervous about coming here," said Papadopoulos, who's retired from working as airline ground personnel.

Christine Zuhoski and Deborah Harris, sisters who live in Riverhead, are bucking the trend and attending Broadway shows now more than ever, especially since retiring from teaching about a decade ago.

Sometimes, they ride the Hampton Jitney. Sometimes, Harris drives them to Ronkonkoma and they take the Long Island Rail Road.

"We come in as often as we can," said Harris, 71, who taught in West Islip, as she thumbed through a planner from her pocketbook to rattle off some of the show titles.

"Operation Mincemeat" and "Smash" on June 11. "The Great Gatsby" on Jan. 2 (then followed by "Annie" at MSG). "Buena Vista Social Club" on Aug. 27. "Just in Time" on Aug. 6. "Hell’s Kitchen" on Aug. 13. "Gypsy" on April 23. "BOOP! The Musical" on June 18. "Good Night, and Good Luck" on May 14. "Stephen Sondheim's Old Friends" on May 28. “& Juliet" on March 6. "Cabaret" on March 25.

"That was just this year!" she said, laughing.

Last month, with a since-called-off strike by unionized theater musicians looming, the sisters came into the city for a matinee performance of the musical "Death Becomes Her" and an evening performance of the play "Art."

As girls, the sisters would go to Broadway with their mom, who came from the Bronx and worked in Manhattan, said Zuhoski, 74, who retired from Riverhead schools.

"She took us to the theater, and we got the bug," Zuhoski said. "We just like to see live theater."

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