The Broadway revival of Evita playing at the Marquis theater will close on Jan. 26 with the departure of Ricky Martin and his two co-stars, Elena Roger and Michael Cerveris the producers announced reversing their plans to re-cast the musical and continue running. Whether the producers will be able to earn back their investors money with such a short run 10-and-a-half months of performances when Evita closes remains to be seen.
Evita will have had 26 preview performances and 337 regular performances at the Marquis Theater when it closes. The high weekly running costs, of Broadway’s top-selling show to open in 2012 closed Saturday night without earning back the $11 million raised from investors.
With a cast of three dozen, Evita was a large-scale undertaking. While Martin’s pay as Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara wasn’t fully detailed, the budget lists a star percentage bonus of 10 percent of weekly box office above $700,000 and star (perquisites) of $18,500 a week. The five principals shared about $170,000 a week in pay and perquisites at the outset of the run.
The bottom line is the show needed to gross an additional 13 percent each week, or a total of about $1.18 million after deducting for credit card commissions, just to repay investors within a year.
