Beautiful on Broadway Closes After 2,478 Performances over Five Years

Broadway Says Goodbye To Beautiful, The King Of All Jukebox Musicals To Grace Broadway

Beautiful: The Carole King Musical finally closed on Broadway, October 27, 2019. The show ran for 5 years, 11 months and 7 days since its first performance on November 21, 2013 grossed over $350 million in ticket sales. Despite this success, the Stephen Sondheim Theatre landlord (the Roundabout Theatre Company) and the show’s producers agreed that it was time for the show to move on the new pastures.

Beautiful: The Carole King Musical became the 27th longest-running musical in Broadway history and eclipsed the original production of Annie and the 1998 revival of Cabaret to get that elusive 27th spot. The show does live on though, as it has a robust touring production that has been wowing crowds all across America. The touring production is scheduled to run into late 2020 and covers practically every state in the union.

Beautiful Delivers An Inspiring Story About Love

Beautiful: The Carole King Musical is a jukebox musical, that followed the life-story of one of the most successful female singer-songwriters of the 20th century, Carole King. The musical featured many of her most famous songs like, “I Feel The Earth Move”, “Some Kind of Wonderful,” and “You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman”. Over the years, Beautiful had its fair share of star studded cast members perform in the show.

Notable Cast Members And Awards

Jessie Mueller starred in the opening cast as the lead, 'Carole King', where she won the Tony Award for “Best Leading Actress in a Musical”. She has since gone on to perform in seven other Broadway shows including, Carousel and Waitress, where she also played the leading character. Barry Mann also starred in the opening cast and he played Jarrod Spector, where he was nominated for the Tony Award for “Best Featured Actor in a Musical”.

More recently, Broadway actors Diane Keen, Kara Lindsay and pop star Vanessa Carlton have all performed in the show to positive critical acclaim and box office success. In total, Beautiful was nominated for seven different Tony Awards (it was the most nominated show in 2013) and won two of them as well as the Grammy Award for “Best Musical Theater Album” that year.

The Last Days Of Beautiful on Broadway

In the final week of performances, the show blew through its recent ticket sales records and in its very final week it played to a whopping 100.61 percent capacity, that was supported by fans who were eager enough to see the show from the standing room only areas, which boosted the numbers above the 100%. This brought in $1,209,465 for ticket sales at the box office for the very last week of the show.

There were still some missed marketing opportunities though, as little marketing is given when a banner show like this is closing and many potential ticket sales are lost. Marketing teams get lazy and use the same old marketing methods to close out a show run, using the same strategies they used when the show was in its normal production schedule, which is clearly a mistake.

Traditional marketing strategies fall short

The traditional marketing strategies fail to ignite because often fans do not even know that the show is set to close. People who also have been meaning to see it also fall victim to the lack of marketing about the final show date and often find out about the show closing after the show has actually closed. Marketing companies that represent the shows during the last few weeks of performances are notoriously bad at promoting the end of any Broadway show.

Even though the final week was a banner week for the show in terms of ticket sales, the preceding weeks were only marginally above where they had been before and could have performed much better if they had been marketed properly, this is, after all, a banner show on Broadway and deserved better.