For much of the past decade, probably longer, regularly attending Broadway shows has been a bit like buying property: yes, some well-to-do younger people can do it, especially if they have help from their parents, but for the most part, it’s something most frequently enjoyed by baby boomers still living off their generational wealth, playing confused about why later generations can’t just do what they do. To some extent, that imbalance will be difficult to change, especially with ticket prices and attendance both setting records, often in concert with each other. But the last year or so on Broadway has also seen a resurgence in shows that pursue a vastly younger audience.
One of the biggest success stories so far is the Romeo + Juliet production starring Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor, which emphasized the youthfulness of a story often aged up, and brought in a recognizable star with her own vocal fanbase – not unlike what Baz Luhrmann did when he cast Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio in the 1996 film version. According to one of its producers, the play managed to hit the youngest Broadway audience in recorded history, with 14% of ticket buyers in the 18 to 25 demographic, as opposed to an industry average of 3%.
That may not sound like a record-torching number, but 18 to 25 is a narrow demo that notably excludes actual kids, who flock to shows like The Lion King and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on their parents’ (or grandparents’) dime. Many of the biggest Broadway productions of recent years have been those family-friendly spectacles or jukebox fare aimed at the nostalgia crowd. But this season has seen a surge in material seemingly aimed at that younger-adult crowd. Recent openers include a Stranger Things prequel, akin to the Harry Potter play only somewhat less kid-friendly and the less spectacle-minded John Proctor Is the Villain, a play about teenage girls reading The Crucible, starring … Sadie Sink from Stranger Things. Even the Stranger Things-free and more traditional-sounding Smash, based on a flop NBC TV series chronicling the making of a musical, appears to skew younger and fresher than, say, last season’s Barry Manilow-penned, second world war-based musical. A superstar version of Othello, one of the hottest tickets on Broadway, probably doesn’t need to offer $50 student-rush tickets, but they’re doing it nonetheless, presumably recognizing both the good optics of a discount option and the danger of pricing out tomorrow’s audiences. It’s also notable that so many youth-targeted shows aren’t splashy musicals but straight plays – always an area that could use the commercial boost.
Maybe younger audiences can do for more challenging work what devoted fanbases have done for musicals like Rent, Spring Awakening, Mean Girls or Hamilton. A recent movie hit has proved the value of that dedication: Wicked, a show that’s been running for more than two decades, finally made the jump to the big screen and became a worldwide smash, seemingly less out of older-audience Oz nostalgia than younger-audience fandom for the show itself, as well as Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. Younger stars like Grande, Sink or Zegler cultivate a level of rabid fandom that doesn’t necessarily greet, say, Denzel Washington, despite his best-to-ever-do-it rep.
So while it might seem counterintuitive for Broadway to court a younger audience for their events priced beyond the reach of many middle-class Americans, it’s also savvy much in the way it makes sense to market an exorbitantly expensive trip to Disney World as a standard, attainable practice. Although movie tickets are priced much, much lower than their Broadway equivalents (which, if you don’t happen to live near New York City, incur an additional cost of entry via travel), Broadway is starting to seem further ahead of the curve regarding a lesson Hollywood has taken ages to learn: you can’t keep recycling the same properties forever. Though movies like Wicked and Minecraft have started their own recent youth-driven sensations, it’s taken studios years to consider that maybe the same mix of 80s and 90s properties (Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, The Matrix) don’t inspire the same excitement in those who came up after generation X.
It may not seem all that revelatory to do a big, expensive play based on a big, expensive Netflix TV series – especially when there was a Back to the Future musical playing on the Great White Way not too long ago. Doubtless there will still be jukebox musicals courting audiences born well before 1975 and musty hit movies awkwardly converted to the stage. But after years of press about how the millennials are killing this or that outdated industry, don’t be surprised if it winds up being gen Z who helps save Broadway from blue-haired oblivion.