Broadway’s summer of farewells reached its emotional peak this week as Moulin Rouge! The Musical played its final performance at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, closing out a seven-year run with its highest weekly gross since 2019. The Broadway League’s official report for the week ending August 30, 2026 shows overall grosses up modestly from the previous week, driven largely by Moulin Rouge’s send-off and a dramatic rebound at Harry Potter and the Cursed Child following its star’s return from a scheduled absence.

Broadway Box Office Snapshot — Week Ending August 30, 2026

These are the official figures from the Broadway League, representing Week 14 of the 2026-2027 season.

Compared to the prior week (ending August 23), gross rose 4%, attendance climbed 2%, and average ticket price ticked up 1% to $115.04. Overall capacity improved nearly 2 percentage points to 87.85%. Year-over-year, against the equivalent week of the 2025-2026 season, gross was down 16% from $30,631,166, attendance fell 6% from 237,539, and average ticket price dropped 11% from $128.95. Show count held steady at 26, down from 28 a year ago, continuing a season-long pattern of a leaner overall lineup than last year’s record-breaking run.

Moulin Rouge’s Emotional Farewell

Moulin Rouge! The Musical played its final Broadway performance this week, closing at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre after more than seven years and over 3,000 performances. The production grossed $2,336,973 in its final week, up $140,768 from the week before, at 100.56% capacity with an average ticket price of $223.46 and a top ticket of $499. According to Broadway News, that figure represents the second-highest weekly gross in the show’s entire seven-year run, trailing only the $2,716,892 posted during its lucrative first Christmas week in December 2019.

The strong finish capped a closing stretch defined by the return of original star Aaron Tveit, who reprised his Tony-winning role as Christian for the production’s final two weeks. Tveit, who has also recently wrapped filming on the indie drama “Nice Eggs” opposite Jane Krakowski and Angourie Rice, drew audiences back in numbers that more than doubled the show’s grosses compared to its final weeks without him, underscoring just how much drawing power a beloved original cast member can still command even after seven years on Broadway.

Top Grossing Shows

Source: The Broadway League, via BroadwayWorld. * indicates the show’s final week before closing.

Harry Potter’s Dramatic Rebound

The week’s second-biggest story was the sharp reversal at Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which jumped $708,025, an 81% increase, to $1,579,332, with capacity rebounding from a scheduled-absence low of 71.23% back up to 88.55%. The swing directly mirrors last week’s equally dramatic decline, when star Tom Felton was out on a previously scheduled vacation, and confirms just how much of the production’s week-to-week performance is tied to his presence in the cast.

Taken together, the two weeks offer one of the clearest single-production case studies of the season in star-driven ticket demand: a nearly $856,000 swing down, followed by a nearly $710,000 swing back up, bookending a single week’s absence. For a play built substantially around name-recognition casting from the Harry Potter film franchise, the data makes an unusually direct case for just how much a marquee performer’s schedule can move a production’s bottom line.

Show-by-Show Highlights

Hamilton held strong in second place at $2,006,023, up $33,805 week-over-week at over 100% capacity, while MJ and The Lion King both eased slightly to $1,682,147 and $1,591,927 respectively, the latter down $229,489 as capacity settled to 92.55%. The Rocky Horror Show posted the week’s steepest decline in dollar terms outside of the top tier, down $226,502 to $722,944.

On the positive side, Titaníque continued its pre-closing rebound, up $87,667 to $903,001 with capacity climbing over 7 points to 89.96% ahead of its September 20 closing. The Outsiders rose $73,388 to $834,837, and Buena Vista Social Club and Operation Mincemeat both posted solid gains of roughly $80,000 and $51,000 respectively. SIX: The Musical, despite its recently announced January 2027 closing, actually improved this week, up $36,556 to $500,194 with capacity climbing nearly 5 points to 64.95%.

Paranormal Activity posted its first full week following its August 25 opening night, grossing $735,747 at 98.84% capacity, essentially flat with its final preview week’s sold-out numbers. & Juliet also rebounded, up $19,710 with capacity climbing nearly 5 points to 85.23%, while Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) remained at the bottom of the chart at $478,256, the week’s lowest gross, though its capacity did improve slightly to 64.47%.

Capacity Deep Dive: A Broadly Improving Week

Unlike several recent reports dominated by a narrow split between closing-show gains and mid-run softness, this week’s capacity picture was more broadly positive. Titaníque (+7.16 points), Operation Mincemeat (+6.28), SIX (+5.04), Buena Vista Social Club (+5.88), and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (+17.32, largely the Felton rebound) all posted meaningful gains, while only a handful of shows, The Lion King, The Lost Boys, and The Great Gatsby’s flat-to-modest movement among them, saw any real softening.

That breadth is a notable departure from the pattern that held for most of August, when gains were concentrated almost entirely in shows with a specific closing-driven catalyst. With Moulin Rouge’s closing now behind the market and Labor Day approaching, this week’s more evenly distributed improvement may be an early signal that Broadway’s traditional late-summer lull is beginning to lift ahead of the fall season, though a single week’s data is far from conclusive on that front.

Looking Back: A Summer of Farewells, By the Numbers

With Moulin Rouge’s closing marking the effective end of this summer’s closing wave, it’s worth stepping back to take stock of just how unusual the past two months have been. Between late June and the end of August, Broadway said goodbye to Death Becomes Her, The Fear of 13, Giant, Proof, Dog Day Afternoon, Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Every Brilliant Thing, Ragtime, and now Moulin Rouge, a genuinely remarkable churn of ten productions closing within roughly a ten-week span.

What stands out most in hindsight is how few of those closings reflected any underlying weakness in ticket demand. Cats, Death of a Salesman, Ragtime, and Moulin Rouge all posted some of their best-ever weeks on their way out, and several of the others closed as planned limited engagements rather than under any commercial pressure. That pattern suggests this summer’s unusually high closing count says more about scheduling, cost structures, and deliberate producing decisions across the industry than it does about any broader softening in Broadway’s audience appetite, a distinction worth keeping in mind heading into a fall season that will need to prove it can build comparable momentum with an almost entirely new set of productions.

Broadway’s Closing Watch: What’s Still Ahead

With Moulin Rouge now closed, only one production remains on the calendar for a final performance in the coming weeks:

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

Titaníque, the Céline Dion-scored Titanic parody, plays its final Broadway performance September 20 at the St. James. This week’s numbers, a seventh consecutive point of capacity improvement over the past several reports, suggest the production is following the same late-run pattern seen at Cats, Death of a Salesman, Ragtime, and Moulin Rouge before it: a meaningful demand surge as its closing date approaches. Expect its final two or three weeks to post some of its strongest grosses of the entire run.

New Arrivals: What’s Opening Next

With the summer’s closing wave now essentially complete, Broadway’s fall season is arriving on schedule over the next six weeks:

School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play begins previews September 8 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre ahead of a September 28 opening, marking Jocelyn Bioh’s Broadway debut nearly a decade after the play’s Off-Broadway premiere, directed by Whitney White with a cast led by Denée Benton and Patina Miller. Bill Irwin’s new adaptation of Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid begins previews September 25 at the Todd Haimes Theatre.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Ed Harris lead a starry revival of Other Desert Cities into previews September 29 at the Hudson Theatre, freshly vacated by Every Brilliant Thing earlier this summer, and Billy Crystal’s solo show 860 begins previews October 1 at the Imperial. With four new productions beginning performances within roughly a month, Broadway’s fall pipeline is filling in at a healthy pace following the summer’s unusually concentrated wave of closings.

Season to Date: Where 2026-2027 Stands

Fourteen weeks into the 2026-2027 season, Broadway has grossed $463,038,620 cumulatively, down about 6% from the same point last year, with total attendance of 3,790,503, down just 1% year-to-year. That narrow attendance gap, even as cumulative gross trails by a wider margin, continues to suggest a market where roughly the same number of people are attending Broadway shows as last year, even as average pricing has softened somewhat across a leaner overall lineup.

With the summer’s closing wave now complete and four new productions beginning previews over the next month, September will be an important month for reading whether Broadway’s fall season can begin closing the year-over-year gap that’s persisted through most of the summer. Last year’s equivalent September weeks were part of the 2025-2026 season’s record-setting stretch, which makes the coming comparisons a genuinely meaningful test.

What to Watch as Fall Arrives

The next month on Broadway will be defined less by closings than by a genuine changing of the guard. Four new productions arriving within roughly five weeks, School Girls, The Imaginary Invalid, Other Desert Cities, and 860, gives the fall season a real chance to demonstrate whether star power alone (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris, Billy Crystal) can generate the kind of opening-week and preview-period numbers that Paranormal Activity managed with its own sold-out previews back in August.

Titaníque’s final three weeks will also be worth tracking closely. If the show follows the pattern set by every other major closing this summer, expect its capacity and gross to keep climbing right up to its September 20 finale, potentially setting up one more record-breaking send-off before Broadway’s fall lineup takes over the conversation entirely.

The Bigger Picture

Broadway’s summer of 2026 will likely be remembered as a season of farewells that outperformed expectations rather than faded quietly. Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Death of a Salesman, Ragtime, and now Moulin Rouge all closed on some of the best weeks of their respective runs, a remarkably consistent pattern across four very different productions, a jukebox musical, a Tony-sweeping play revival, a Tony-sweeping musical revival, and a long-running commercial hit. That consistency suggests producers and marketing teams across the industry have gotten genuinely skilled at generating last-chance urgency, regardless of a show’s genre or original commercial trajectory.

What comes next matters just as much. With only Titaníque remaining on the closing calendar and four new productions arriving by early October, Broadway is entering a genuine transition period from a summer defined by turnover to a fall that will need to prove those new arrivals can build the kind of audiences the season’s departed hits leave behind. The League’s numbers over the next six to eight weeks will offer the clearest read yet on whether 2026-2027 can close its year-over-year gap before the traditionally strong holiday season begins.

Ticket Pricing Trends to Watch

Average ticket price rose modestly to $115.04, up 1% from the prior week but down 11% year-over-year — one of the larger year-over-year pricing gaps of the season. Moulin Rouge’s closing-week average of $223.46 topped the board, followed by Hamilton at $188.91 and MJ at $155.07. The loss of several premium-priced closing shows earlier in the summer, Death of a Salesman, Cats, and Ragtime among them, continues to weigh on the market’s overall average even as remaining shows perform solidly on their own terms.

At the low end, Wicked’s $85.61 average was among the week’s lowest, alongside Two Strangers at $88.57 and SIX at $93.37, all long-running or catalog-driven musicals competing primarily on volume and accessibility rather than premium pricing.

What Producers and Investors Are Watching

Moulin Rouge’s closing offers a clean, repeatable case study for the industry: a strong final-weeks marketing push built around a beloved returning cast member can meaningfully outperform even a healthy baseline of ticket sales. Combined with Ragtime’s awards-driven closing surge and Cats’ capacity-driven farewell, this summer has effectively produced three distinct, successful playbooks for maximizing a limited engagement’s final weeks, star casting, critical prestige, and pure word-of-mouth urgency, giving future productions a genuine menu of strategies to draw from.

The Al Hirschfeld Theatre, now vacant after Moulin Rouge’s seven-year tenancy, joins the Winter Garden, Broadhurst, Hudson, and Vivian Beaumont as a major house awaiting its next tenant this season. With four new productions confirmed at other venues over the next month but none yet announced for the Hirschfeld specifically, that booking will be one of the more closely watched real estate decisions on the Rialto heading into the fall.

Off-Broadway and Beyond

Off-Broadway continues its own steady autumn ramp-up alongside Broadway’s fall arrivals. With several solo shows and limited engagements having wrapped over the summer, the broader New York theatre ecosystem is entering its traditional September and October rush in step with the main stem, setting up a busy fall across every level of the city’s theatre scene.

We’ll be back next week with the latest figures, along with continued coverage of Titaníque’s final weeks, the fall season’s new arrivals, and how Broadway’s year-over-year comparisons shape up as the calendar turns toward autumn.

Reporting compiled from The Broadway League, BroadwayWorld, Broadway News, Deadline, Playbill, Broadway Direct, and Broadway.com. Figures reflect the week ending August 30, 2026, as reported by the Broadway League.