Brian Bedford's production of The Importance of Being Earnest for the Roundabout Theatre Company - based on his Stratford Shakespeare Festival production of 2009 - opened on Broadway a couple of weeks ago now. The New York critics were very kind - according to aggregator Stage Grade, it's the third best-reviewed non-musical play in New York right now.
Bedford's completely uncampy performance in drag as Lady Bracknell has been earning raves, while Stratford's Sara Topham - one of the few Canadian hold-overs - has been exceedingly well received in her Broadway debut. She's been called nice things like "a riot" and "ravishing" and "tiny-waisted" by the critics.
Yesterday, Jonathan Mandell aka @NewYorkTheater tweeted more good news about the production - news that at first blush seemed astonishing: "Nice to see that The Importance of Being Earnest had the 3rd highest % of seats sold last week on Bway, after only Wicked and Spider-Man."
Is a movie-star-less production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest really the third hottest show on the Great White Way right now? Well, unlike theatre districts everywhere else in the world, Broadway's box office statistics are available for anyone to scrutinize closely on websites like Broadway World, so we can find out for ourselves.
As it turns out, Earnest did indeed sell 94.4% of its seats last week, topped only by the radioactive superhero and the witches of Oz in terms of capacity.
That is heartening news. But it's also slightly misleading as a statistic. Here's the catch: in playing eight times a week in a 740-seat theatre, the second-smallest on Broadway, Earnest only had a maximum of 5,920 seats to sell. By contrast, Spider-Man is in a 1930-seat theatre and Wicked is in a 1809-seat theatre.
In real terms then, Earnest actually sold about 40% as many tickets as those two powerhouse musicals. And with an average ticket prices of $63.82, Earnest grossed about 25% of what those pricier shows did in the same time period. Its weekly gross was actually the third lowest on Broadway (though its weekly running costs are no doubt much much lower than the high-tech musicals mentioned).
So is Earnest the third-hottest show on Broadway or the third-coolest? The truth, as Algernon says in The Importance of Being Earnest, is rarely pure and never simple. (He adds: "Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.") Bedford's production is definitely a hit, but it is no Spider-Man - and I'm sure the actors in it thank heaven for that every day.
Update: Shortly after this was written, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival sent out a press release announcing that the Roundabout Theatre Company's production of The Importance of Being Earnest is being extended on Broadway by 17 weeks. It will now run until July 3.
That's good news for Stratford, but, alas, there is also bad news: This means that Brian Bedford will not be able to direct Moliere's The Misanthrope next summer. He will still be playing Oronte in the production, however.
According to Stratford, Sara Topham will also return to the Festival company to play Célimène in The Misanthrope and Olivia in Twelfth Night as scheduled, which will mean she'll have to cut out of the Broadway production before it closes.