Broadway closed the book on three notable runs this week — and closed them in style. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Cats: The Jellicle Ball both posted the single best weeks of their entire engagements in their final performances, while Every Brilliant Thing surged more than 35% in its own farewell. The Broadway League’s official report for the week ending August 9, 2026 shows overall grosses holding essentially flat against the previous week, masking a market in real transition as the summer’s closing wave works its way through the schedule.

Broadway Box Office Snapshot — Week Ending August 9, 2026

These are the official figures from the Broadway League, representing Week 11 of the 2026-2027 season.

Compared to the prior week (ending August 2), gross was down 1%, attendance fell 2%, and average ticket price rose 2% to $130.95. Year-over-year, against the equivalent week of the 2025-2026 season, gross was up 9% from $31,003,860, attendance was up 2%, and average ticket price climbed 6% from $123.22. Show count held steady at 29, though that stability is deceptive — three productions played their final performances this week and will drop off next week’s count entirely.

This Week’s Closings: Three Shows Take Their Final Bow

Rather than fading quietly, all three of this week’s closing productions went out with some of the strongest numbers of their entire Broadway runs.

Source: The Broadway League, via BroadwayWorld. Figures for the week ending August 9, 2026.

Death of a Salesman closed at the Winter Garden Theatre on a genuine high note, jumping nearly 13% in its final week to $2,509,387 — comfortably its best single-week gross of the entire run, and enough to make it the week’s top-grossing show on Broadway. The revival also carried the week’s highest average ticket price at $239.61, a fitting send-off for a production that swept six Tony Awards this season, including Best Revival of a Play, and stands as the most-awarded play revival in Broadway history.

Cats: The Jellicle Ball closed at the Broadhurst with an even larger percentage jump, up 30% to $1,828,306 — its best week since opening, and a striking coda for a production whose early closing announcement caught much of the Broadway community off guard last month. Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber had cited rising production costs and the broader economic climate for the decision to close five months ahead of a previously announced extension, but the final numbers suggest audience demand was, if anything, still building.

Every Brilliant Thing, Tracee Ellis Ross’s solo Broadway debut, closed at the Hudson Theatre up 35% to $886,815 at nearly 100% capacity, capping a run that steadily built momentum in its final weeks. All three closings free up their respective theatres — the Winter Garden, Broadhurst, and Hudson — at a moment when Broadway’s fall pipeline is still filling in.

Top Grossing Shows

Source: The Broadway League, via BroadwayWorld. * indicates final week of the engagement.

Show-by-Show Highlights

Hamilton stayed near the top of the board at $2,268,037, down slightly week-over-week but still holding 101.30% capacity, while The Lion King climbed to $2,241,283, up over $80,000. Ragtime held essentially flat at $1,854,157 with a full 100% capacity in the middle of its final stretch, and carried the week’s second-highest average ticket price at $220.10 with a top ticket of $499 — pricing that reflects the growing urgency around its August 16 closing.

MJ and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child both eased slightly from the previous week, to $1,845,936 and $1,806,729 respectively, while The Lost Boys and Wicked posted more meaningful pullbacks, down $161,077 and $98,411. Aladdin also cooled to $1,322,068 after a strong prior week.

The steepest declines of the week came from a cluster of shows without an imminent closing date to drive urgency. SIX: The Musical dropped sharply to $576,816, with capacity falling nearly 11 points to 70.85%, the largest single capacity swing on the entire board. Titaníque fell to $759,367 as capacity dropped 9 points to 79.06%, and The Rocky Horror Show slid to $757,958 at 81.20% capacity. Stranger Things: The First Shadow and The Outsiders also posted notable pullbacks, down over $100,000 and $88,000 respectively.

Not every show cooled off, though. The Great Gatsby continued its recent climb, up to $916,218, and Oh, Mary! held near-capacity at 99.87% with a gross of $1,055,082. Just in Time jumped over 5% to $684,166 at 99.11% capacity, one of the stronger percentage gains on the board.

Musicals vs. Plays: Closing Shows Prove Plays Can Go the Distance

Death of a Salesman’s closing-week performance adds another data point to one of this season’s clearest trends: star-driven, critically acclaimed plays have proven just as commercially durable as Broadway’s biggest musicals, if not more so on a per-ticket basis. At $239.61 average ticket price, the Arthur Miller revival closed out its run commanding a higher per-seat price than every musical on the board, including Hamilton and Ragtime. That’s a notable outcome for a play in a genre that, historically, has been seen as more fragile at the box office than musicals once the initial opening buzz fades.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Oh, Mary! both continue to reinforce the same pattern this week, holding average ticket prices and capacity numbers that rival or exceed most of the season’s musicals despite playing in comparatively smaller houses. Stranger Things: The First Shadow, despite a softer week, still carried a $92.27 average that outpaced several long-running musicals on the board. Taken together, this season’s plays are increasingly proving that a strong critical reception and awards momentum can translate into sustained commercial strength all the way through closing night, not just during an opening-month press cycle.

Musicals, for their part, remain Broadway’s volume engine. Hamilton, The Lion King, MJ, and Wicked together account for a substantial share of the week’s total attendance, even as several of the market’s largest houses — Wicked’s Gershwin, The Lion King’s Minskoff — settled into the low-to-mid 90s in capacity rather than the near-sellout numbers posted by this week’s closing plays. That split, familiar from earlier in the season, continues to define how Broadway’s commercial ecosystem actually functions: plays driving premium per-ticket revenue in their final weeks, musicals sustaining the broader base of weekly attendance across the market’s largest venues.

What Producers and Investors Are Watching

For industry insiders, this week’s numbers offer a genuinely encouraging signal about the economics of a well-managed closing. All three shows that ended their runs this week — Death of a Salesman, Cats: The Jellicle Ball, and Every Brilliant Thing — left money on the table in the sense that they could plausibly have continued selling tickets at these levels, yet all three had reasons independent of demand for setting their closing dates. Death of a Salesman and Every Brilliant Thing were both structured as limited engagements from the outset, giving producers a defined endpoint regardless of box office strength. Cats: The Jellicle Ball’s early closing, by contrast, was framed explicitly around rising production costs rather than ticket demand, a distinction worth keeping in mind when reading this week’s record-setting final numbers as validation of the show’s commercial prospects.

The three theatres freed up this week — the Winter Garden, Broadhurst, and Hudson — now sit vacant at a moment when Broadway’s confirmed fall pipeline remains relatively thin. Only Paranormal Activity has a confirmed booking in the six weeks following this report, at the August Wilson rather than any of the three newly available houses. That gap between closings and confirmed new tenants is typical for this point in the summer, but it’s also a reminder of how much real estate uncertainty persists on the Rialto even during a season that’s broadly outperforming on a year-over-year basis.

There’s a pricing story here too. With three of the summer’s highest-grossing limited engagements now off the board, next week’s market-wide average ticket price could see real movement, since Death of a Salesman alone had been commanding a premium well above the market mean. Investors and general managers watching that metric closely over the next several reports will get a clearer read on whether this week’s 6% year-over-year pricing gain reflects a durable trend or was substantially inflated by three shows now in the rearview mirror.

Broadway’s Closing Watch: What’s Still Ahead

With Cats, Death of a Salesman, and Every Brilliant Thing now closed, three more productions remain on the calendar for final performances over the next six weeks:

Closing dates as announced; subject to further extension or change.

Ragtime plays its final performance August 16 at the Vivian Beaumont after an extension following its four-Tony sweep, including Best Revival of a Musical. Moulin Rouge! The Musical ends its seven-year Broadway run August 30 at the Al Hirschfeld, having received a month-long extension from its originally announced July 26 closing date; Tony winner Aaron Tveit returns to the production as Christian from August 18 through 29 for the final two weeks. Titaníque, the Céline Dion-scored Titanic parody, plays its last Broadway performance September 20 at the St. James — though this week’s figures show the show cooling significantly ahead of that date, worth watching as its farewell approaches.

New Arrivals: What’s Opening Next

As theatres clear out from the summer’s closings, Broadway’s fall season begins arriving in earnest:

Paranormal Activity becomes Broadway’s first major fall arrival, beginning previews at the August Wilson Theatre on August 14 ahead of a September 15 opening night. Directed by Felix Barrett with an original story by Levi Holloway, the stage adaptation reimagines the horror film franchise for live theatre and has already played sold-out engagements at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, Washington D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, and San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, along with a run at London’s Ambassadors Theatre that earned an Olivier Award nomination. The Broadway company stars Cher Álvarez, Travis A. Knight, Shannon Cochran, and Andrea Syglowski.

School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, Jocelyn Bioh’s comedy set at a Ghanaian boarding school ahead of a beauty pageant, begins previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on September 8 ahead of a September 28 opening — its Broadway debut nearly a decade after premiering Off-Broadway at MCC Theater, directed by Whitney White with a cast led by Denée Benton and Patina Miller.

Further out, the fall calendar continues taking shape: Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Ed Harris lead a revival of Other Desert Cities at the Hudson Theatre beginning September 29, Billy Crystal’s solo show 860 begins previews October 1, and Bill Irwin’s adaptation of The Imaginary Invalid begins previews September 25 at the Todd Haimes Theatre — a promising sign that the theatres vacated by this month’s closing wave won’t stay dark for long.

Capacity Watch: Who’s Cooling Off

With three high-capacity closing shows dropping off the board, and several mid-run productions posting real capacity declines, the overall market softened modestly this week even as star-power shows held firm. SIX: The Musical’s nearly 11-point capacity drop stands out as the week’s most dramatic single swing, followed by Titaníque’s 9-point decline and The Outsiders’ nearly 4-point pullback. None of these three has a closing date on the books, which makes the softness worth monitoring — particularly for Titaníque, given its own September 20 closing is now just six weeks away.

On the other end, Ragtime, MJ, and Oh, Mary! all held above 99% capacity, and Hamilton and Death of a Salesman both cleared 101%, underscoring how much the top tier of the market continues to outperform the middle of the pack.

Season to Date: Where 2026-2027 Stands

Eleven weeks into the 2026-2027 season, Broadway has grossed $385,441,582 in total, down roughly 4% from the same point last year, with total attendance of 3,121,255 holding essentially steady year-over-year. That’s a meaningfully narrower gap than earlier in the summer, when cumulative grosses were running closer to 5% behind pace — a sign that the market’s individual strong weeks, including this one’s 9% year-over-year gain, are gradually closing the distance.

The next month will test that trajectory directly. With Ragtime, Moulin Rouge, and Titaníque all set to close by late September, and only Paranormal Activity confirmed to open in that same window, Broadway’s total show count is likely to keep contracting through early fall before the bigger wave of October openings — Other Desert Cities, 860, The Imaginary Invalid, and more — begins to rebuild it.

The Bigger Picture

Broadway enters mid-August still riding the tailwind of a record-breaking 2025-2026 season that brought in $1.91 billion in total revenue and 14.6 million attendees, the first time since 2019 that attendance topped pre-pandemic levels. This week’s closings offer a useful data point on the health of that momentum: three productions that could easily have faded quietly into their final performances instead posted some of the best numbers of their entire runs, a strong signal that audience demand for quality theatre remains robust even as individual shows reach the end of commercially successful engagements.

That said, the softness among several mid-run, non-closing shows this week is a reminder that not every production benefits equally from summer tourist traffic. As the market thins out over the next several weeks, the shows without a ticking clock or a fresh awards narrative will need to find other ways to sustain capacity heading into the historically slower late-summer stretch.

Ticket Pricing Trends to Watch

Average ticket price rose to $130.95, up 2% from the prior week and up a more substantial 6% year-over-year — the largest year-over-year pricing gain of the summer so far. Death of a Salesman’s closing-week average of $239.61 topped the board, followed by Ragtime at $220.10 and Hamilton at $211.37, all three reflecting premium pricing tied to closing urgency, Tony-winning pedigree, or both.

At the other end, Wicked ($97.78), Aladdin ($101.41), and Two Strangers ($91.06) posted some of the lowest average prices on the board — a reminder that Broadway’s largest, longest-running musicals continue to compete on volume and broad accessibility rather than premium per-ticket pricing, even during a summer when several closing shows have shown real pricing power.

Off-Broadway and Beyond

Off-Broadway has its own late-summer closing to note: Cat Cohen’s solo comedy Broad Strokes wraps its limited engagement this month, part of a busy summer slate of solo shows and limited runs that also included The Whoopi Monologues at Lincoln Center, which set a house record for the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater earlier this month, and Rosie O’Donnell’s Common Knowledge. As Broadway’s own closing wave continues, the broader New York theatre ecosystem keeps turning over its own lineup in parallel.

We’ll be back next week with the latest figures, along with continued coverage of the Ragtime and Moulin Rouge closings, Paranormal Activity’s previews, and the shape of Broadway’s 2026-2027 fall season as it comes into focus.

Reporting compiled from The Broadway League, BroadwayWorld, Broadway News, Deadline, Playbill, Broadway Direct, Broadway.com, and New York Theater. Figures reflect the week ending August 9, 2026, as reported by the Broadway League.