A recent New York Times piece suggested that “the Broadway musical is in trouble.” Much of the context in that reporting is fair: capitalization costs have soared, risk tolerance has shrunk and post-pandemic economics have forced shows to fight harder than ever to find their audience. But from my perspective as president and CEO of the American Theatre Wing, the suggestion that the Broadway musical faces an existential crisis misses the point. Broadway isn’t dying. It is evolving.
This is hardly the first time someone has sounded the alarm. Broadway’s doom has been predicted for more than half a century. In 1969, The Times asked, “Has Broadway Had It?” In 1995, New York Magazine devoted a cover story to the ominous question, “Can Broadway Be Saved?” In 2005, The New Yorker chronicled Michael John Lachiusa declaring that “the Broadway musical is dead.” And for decades, Michael Riedel made a sport of declaring the art form on life support. The headlines keep coming. Broadway keeps going.
What is different today is the broader economic climate that frames these anxieties. Structural pressures such as persistent inflation, rising labor and materials costs, soaring commercial real estate prices and dramatically higher customer acquisition and marketing expenses have narrowed margins for every producer, not just the ambitious or experimental ones.
There is truth to the argument that rising costs are squeezing the commercial musical. When a new production can cost $25 million to mount and hundreds of thousands a week to run, even a critically embraced musical can close before it finds its audience. But the deeper issue is not the musical itself. It is the financial framework built around one narrow barometer of success: recoupment.
Recoupment was never a perfect metric. Today, it is a deeply incomplete one. It does not account for the multiple lives a show now leads, nor does it reflect who gets paid and when. Many shows deemed “financial disappointments” still employ hundreds at union wages, pay out royalties, seed tours, sustain licensing income, launch international productions and enjoy long afterlives in cast recordings, classrooms and regional productions. Lead producers generate income from their productions even when investors do not. None of this is nefarious. Measuring the health of the American musical solely by first-run Broadway recoupment is like judging a river only by its narrowest point. By more nuanced measures, it’s fair to argue the musical is thriving. It’s easy to find the green shoots if you know where to look.
Audiences are showing up and changing. MJ continues to bring first-time Broadway goers to the art form, fans of pop and R&B who never saw Broadway as “for them.” Buena Vista Social Club, sung entirely in Spanish, has welcomed multigenerational Latino audiences with a celebration of Afro-Cuban musical heritage rarely seen on commercial stages. Maybe Happy Ending, a tender futuristic love story from South Korea, broke box office records on its way to the Tony Award for Best Musical. These are not blips. They are proof of a widening circle.
At the American Theatre Wing, we see this future building in real time. Our mission is to invest in brave work, support creative growth and expand the pipeline of theatre makers and audiences. From that vantage point, the story is not one of collapse but of possibility. This year, our Jonathan Larson Grants received nearly 1,000 applications, the highest number in the program’s 28-year history. Writers are bringing new musical languages, new cultural influences, new storytelling traditions and new sonic identities to the form. The appetite to make musicals has never been stronger.
And this lineage is not theoretical. Larson Grant alumni include benj pasek and Justin Paul, Dave Malloy, Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey, Shaina Taub, Michael R. Jackson, Joe Iconis and many others whose work has reshaped the art form. Collectively, they have gone on to win Pulitzers, Tonys, Grammys, Emmys and Oscars. If this form were dying, so many extraordinary artists wouldn’t be sprinting toward it.
<img decoding="async" class="lazyload wp-image-1601432 size-full-width" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/11/MAIN.Conrad-Ricamora-and-Cole-Escola-in-Oh-Mary-8479-Photo-Credit-Emilio-Madrid.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="Conrad Ricamora and Cole Escola on stage performing Oh Mary!” width=”970″ height=”660″ data-caption=’Cole Escola’s <em>Oh Mary!</em> was the first show of the 2024-25 season to recoup its $4.5 million investment and has been extended three times. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Emilio Madrid</span>’>
The momentum extends beyond musicals. Oh, Mary!, Cole Escola’s deliriously bold, proudly queer comedy, is one of the hottest tickets on Broadway. No franchise. No brand recognition. No advance fan base. Just a singular voice. And audiences are hungry for it. And the cultural footprint of musicals radiates far beyond New York. The screen adaptation of Wicked surpassed $750 million at the global box office. The filmed capture of Hamilton drove an estimated 752,000 app downloads for Disney+ in its first three days of streaming. These are not the stats of a fading form. They are the proof of a migrating one.
None of this ignores the very real economic challenges facing Broadway. They are structural, significant and shared across the industry. But a financial model in need of reinvention is not evidence of an art form in peril. It is evidence that the infrastructure has fallen out of step with the imagination it is meant to serve. Musical theater has never belonged to a single venue, a single revenue stream or a single definition of success. The impulse at the heart of it, to turn story into song and gather a community to listen, predates every balance sheet and will outlive every one of them.
The death of Broadway has been announced too many times to count. But as long as there are artists who have something to say, audiences who ache to feel something true and institutions committed to widening who gets to make and see this work, the orchestra will keep playing. We should not fear for the future of the musical. We must keep building it, every day, alongside the artists already writing its next song.
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