Broadway’s closing wave claimed another marquee title this week, and Ragtime went out the way it came in: setting records. The Lincoln Center Theater revival broke its own house record at the Vivian Beaumont Theater for the fourth time in its run during its final performance week, capping one of the season’s most decorated engagements. The Broadway League’s official report for the week ending August 16, 2026 shows overall grosses down sharply from the previous week — but that dip is almost entirely a function of an emptier schedule, not weaker underlying demand.

Broadway Box Office Snapshot — Week Ending August 16, 2026

These are the official figures from the Broadway League, representing Week 12 of the 2026-2027 season.

Compared to the prior week (ending August 9), gross fell 19.9%, attendance dropped 12.1%, and overall capacity slipped roughly 4 points to 87.52%. Average ticket price fell $11.59 to $119.36. Year-over-year, against the equivalent week of the 2025-2026 season, gross was down 9.4% from $29,790,665, attendance was down 8%, and capacity was essentially flat, down just 0.1 percentage points from 87.6%.

The steep week-over-week decline is largely mechanical. Show count fell to 27 from 29 — Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Death of a Salesman, and Every Brilliant Thing all closed the previous week, while Paranormal Activity added only its first few preview performances to this week’s tally, beginning Friday, August 14. A net loss of two full-capacity, high-grossing productions from the board was always going to show up as a significant drop in the topline number, even with the remaining shows performing solidly.

Ragtime’s Record-Setting Farewell

Ragtime’s closing week was the story of the report. The production grossed $1,963,666 in its final week at the Vivian Beaumont, up $109,509 over the previous week and enough to break its own house record for the fourth time during its run — an unusually high number of records for a single production to set, let alone in its final month. The revival closed at 100% capacity with an average ticket price of $233.10, the highest of any show on the board this week, and a $499 top ticket price that reflected the last-chance urgency around its closing.

The production’s run at Lincoln Center Theater was one of this season’s genuine critical and commercial success stories: a transfer of New York City Center’s Encores! Gala production that went on to sweep four 2026 Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Musical, Leading Actor and Actress in a Musical for Joshua Henry and Caissie Levy, and Sound Design for Kai Harada. Those four wins tied Ragtime with The Lost Boys and Schmigadoon! as the most Tony-winning musicals of the season, and its closing-week numbers suggest audiences kept discovering it right up to the final curtain.

Top Grossing Shows

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

Show-by-Show Highlights

Hamilton reclaimed the top spot on the chart at $2,123,135, even as it dipped $144,902 from the previous week, holding a near-sellout 99.8% capacity and the second-highest average ticket price on the board at $200.85. The Lion King settled back down to $1,892,710, a drop of $348,573 — the largest dollar decline of the week — as the production returned to its standard eight-performance schedule after the previous week’s extra-performance boost. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child continued its remarkable year-over-year growth, up 71.5% from the same week last season ($1,727,075 vs. $1,007,154), the single largest year-over-year percentage gain of any show on the board.

MJ eased to $1,686,483, down $159,454 week-over-week but still up a striking 37.3% year-over-year. Chicago and Hadestown both posted strong year-over-year gains as well, up 39.9% and 33.5% respectively, while Moulin Rouge! The Musical climbed $110,727 week-over-week to $1,084,659, up nearly 18% year-over-year as its own August 30 closing draws nearer. The Rocky Horror Show also gained ground, up $71,160 and posting the week’s second-largest attendance increase.

On the softer end, Aladdin fell $225,797 week-over-week, and The Outsiders dropped $123,938 with one of the week’s steepest attendance declines. SIX: The Musical and Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) occupied the bottom of the gross chart at $498,188 and $484,143 respectively, with SIX posting the lowest capacity of the week at 63.1%. Stranger Things: The First Shadow, Titaníque, and The Great Gatsby rounded out the lowest-capacity tier, all between 69% and 76%.

Pricing and Capacity Leaders

Source: The Broadway League, via BroadwayWorld.

At the other end of the spectrum, Stranger Things: The First Shadow posted the week’s lowest average ticket price at $86.60, followed by Titaníque ($87.18), Aladdin ($88.70), Two Strangers ($89.49), and The Great Gatsby ($90.64). On capacity, SIX: The Musical filled just 63.1% of seats, the lowest mark on the board, with Two Strangers (64.6%), Stranger Things (69%), Titaníque (75%), and The Great Gatsby (76%) rounding out the bottom five.

Musicals vs. Plays: A Season Still Defined by Star Power

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’s 71.5% year-over-year surge is the clearest data point yet that this season’s plays continue to outperform expectations. The Tony-winning production is drawing audiences well beyond its own history at the Lyric, a growth rate no musical on this week’s board came close to matching. Whether that momentum builds further remains to be seen following the news that Ron Weasley himself, Rupert Grint, will join the production’s cast later this year — a casting announcement that broke just after this reporting week and could meaningfully extend the show’s audience reach into the fall.

Ragtime’s closing-week numbers add another entry to the same pattern: a musical built on serious dramatic material and prestige casting, rather than pure spectacle, closing at a full house with the highest average ticket price on the board. Between Ragtime’s send-off and Harry Potter’s continued growth, this week’s report reinforces a theme that’s held for most of the 2026-2027 season — critical acclaim and awards pedigree are translating into real, sustained box office strength, not just opening-week buzz.

Capacity Deep Dive: A Market in Transition

The four-point capacity drop this week, from 91.56% to 87.52%, is worth examining more closely than the topline number suggests. Rather than reflecting broad softening, the decline is concentrated in a specific set of shows: Maybe Happy Ending fell 9.3 percentage points, The Outsiders dropped 8 points, and SIX slid another 7.8 points on top of an already-low base. None of these three has a closing date on the books, which makes their softness a genuinely different story than the strength being posted by Ragtime, Moulin Rouge, and the other productions currently benefiting from last-chance urgency.

By contrast, only two shows improved their capacity week-over-week: The Rocky Horror Show, up 6.5 points, and Moulin Rouge, up 3.8 points as its own closing draws nearer. That’s a striking imbalance — a market where almost every show without an expiration date lost ground, while the shows approaching their final performances either held steady or gained. It’s a pattern that’s now repeated for three consecutive weekly reports, and one worth watching closely as Titaníque’s own September 20 closing approaches; based on this summer’s data, a late push in ticket sales would be the expected outcome rather than a surprise.

How This Season Compares to Last Year

Broadway’s 2026-2027 season continues to track as a study in contrasts against the record-breaking 2025-2026 campaign that closed at $1.91 billion in total revenue and 14.6 million attendees. Individual weeks have swung between double-digit year-over-year gains and, as with this week, meaningful declines, depending heavily on which high-grossing shows happen to be in their final or opening weeks at any given moment. This week’s 9.4% year-over-year gross decline sits alongside a nearly flat capacity comparison, a combination that points less toward a fundamental demand problem and more toward a temporary mismatch between last year’s show lineup and this year’s, particularly given how many long-running hits have exited the board over the summer.

That volatility makes the coming month unusually important for reading the season’s real trajectory. As Moulin Rouge and Titaníque close and Paranormal Activity and School Girls ramp up, the September comparisons against last year’s equivalent weeks — when the 2025-2026 season was firmly in its record-setting stride — will offer one of the clearest tests yet of whether 2026-2027 can close the gap before the calendar turns to the traditionally stronger fall and holiday stretch.

Broadway’s Closing Watch: What’s Still Ahead

With Ragtime now closed, two more productions remain on the calendar for final performances over the next six weeks:

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

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, and this week’s numbers — up nearly 18% year-over-year and posting one of the largest week-over-week gains on the board — suggest a strong send-off is building. Titaníque, the Céline Dion-scored Titanic parody, plays its final Broadway performance September 20 at the St. James, though its capacity has continued to soften in recent weeks, worth watching as its own closing approaches.

New Arrivals: What’s Opening Next

As theatres clear out from the summer’s closings, Broadway’s fall season continues arriving on schedule:

Paranormal Activity began its first Broadway previews on Friday, August 14, at the August Wilson Theatre, ahead of an opening night now set for August 25 — moved up from an originally announced September date. The stage adaptation of the horror film franchise, directed by Felix Barrett and written by Levi Holloway, arrives after sold-out engagements in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Toronto, and an Olivier Award-nominated run in London’s West End. The Broadway company is led by Cher Álvarez, Travis A. Knight, Shannon Cochran, and Andrea Syglowski, with the production booked for a strictly limited 20-week engagement through January 3, 2027.

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 keeps filling in: Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Ed Harris lead a revival of Other Desert Cities beginning previews September 29 at the Hudson Theatre, Bill Irwin’s adaptation of The Imaginary Invalid begins previews September 25 at the Todd Haimes Theatre, and Billy Crystal’s solo show 860 begins previews October 1 at the Imperial — a promising sign that the theatres freed up by this month’s closing wave are already spoken for heading into autumn.

Season to Date: Where 2026-2027 Stands

Twelve weeks into the 2026-2027 season, Broadway has grossed approximately $412.4 million cumulatively, based on official weekly League figures. The season’s pace has been genuinely uneven all summer — a run of closings in late June and early August has repeatedly thinned the schedule just as individual weeks posted strong percentage gains, making the cumulative comparison to last year’s record-breaking pace a moving target from week to week.

The next month will be a real test of that trajectory. With Moulin Rouge and Titaníque both set to close by late September, and only Paranormal Activity and School Girls 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’s summer of 2026 has been defined less by any single trend than by constant turnover: a wave of high-profile closings, several of them going out on record-breaking or career-best weeks, arriving in tandem with a fall pipeline that’s filling in steadily but not yet at full strength. Ragtime’s fourth house record in its final week is a particularly strong data point for producers watching how “prestige” productions — critically acclaimed, awards-decorated, but not necessarily built around pop-culture IP — can perform commercially all the way to closing night.

At the same time, this week’s 9.4% year-over-year gross decline is a reminder that not every week will outperform the prior season, even in a year that’s shown real resilience overall. With capacity essentially flat year-over-year despite the gross decline, the underlying story looks less like falling demand and more like a temporarily smaller, higher-turnover marketplace working through a genuinely unusual summer.

Ticket Pricing Trends to Watch

Average ticket price fell to $119.36, down $11.59 from the prior week and down modestly year-over-year from $121.20. Much of that week-over-week decline reflects the loss of Death of a Salesman, Cats, and Every Brilliant Thing from the roster — all three had posted premium pricing in their final weeks — rather than any broad softening in what audiences are willing to pay for the shows still running.

Ragtime’s closing-week average of $233.10 topped the board by a wide margin, followed by Hamilton at $200.85. Beyond those two, pricing dropped off sharply: MJ’s $157.62 was the next-highest average, more than $75 below Hamilton’s. That gap illustrates just how much of the market’s premium pricing this summer has been concentrated in a small handful of shows, rather than spread evenly across the board.

What Producers and Investors Are Watching

For industry insiders, Ragtime’s closing offers a useful case study in how a well-reviewed, awards-winning production can sustain — and even grow — demand right up until its final performance, rather than fading as audiences assume a show is winding down. That’s a meaningfully different pattern than several of the mid-run productions further down this week’s chart, where capacity has been softening for weeks without any closing date to reverse the trend.

The freshly announced SIX closing adds another data point worth tracking heading into next season: even musicals with genuine longevity — SIX will have run nearly five and a half years by the time it closes — eventually reach a point where producers choose to end a profitable run on their own terms. With the Lena Horne Theatre set to become available in January, and the Al Hirschfeld and St. James following by autumn, Broadway’s real estate picture for early 2027 is starting to take shape well in advance.

Off-Broadway and Beyond

Off-Broadway continues its own steady turnover alongside Broadway’s closing wave. Following The Whoopi Monologues’ house record at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater earlier this month, and the recent closings of Cat Cohen’s Broad Strokes and Rosie O’Donnell’s Common Knowledge, the broader New York theatre ecosystem remains just as active as the main stem heading into the final weeks of summer.

We’ll be back next week with the latest figures, along with continued coverage of the Moulin Rouge and Titaníque closings, Paranormal Activity’s opening night, 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 Theatre Guide. Figures reflect the week ending August 16, 2026, as reported by the Broadway League.