Tonight, We Sell-ebrate Broadway

Why the most obvious campaign for Broadway hasn't happened--yet

I love the Tonys so damn much. I don’t remember a June where I didn’t watch them–as though that Sunday were a high holy day. They’re our Christmas Eve service. They’re our Super Bowl. Growing up, they were the day I’d judge my taste against the industry’s–a test of: could I ever be a tastemaker in that space? How successfully can I predict the winners in any given year? If I disagreed with “those people working on Broadway”--why? What had I missed?

Decades later, in a plot twist unthinkable to child me, I work in the industry™. And even more unthinkably, last year, thanks to the remarkable generosity of a friend and colleague, I got to attend the Tonys and see the musical I cared so deeply about (Maybe Happy Ending)–and ultimately worked on–win Best Musical. It was wild. It was glorious. (See here.)

I still play that game. What will be a critical success? A commercial success? The unicorn show that’s both? Now, I start playing it a hell of a lot earlier–in readings, workshops, out of towns. Often, I get it right, but sometimes (wildly underestimating Operation Mincemeat’s longevity stateside, for instance, ditto to Buena Vista Social Club), I get it flat wrong.

In certain ways, I’ve become cynical about the whole awards thing: the campaign of it all, the politics, the fancy dinners, the wining and dining. Shouldn’t it only be about the art?? As though it works that way across any facet of the entertainment industry.

But in another specific way, I’ve actually become more hopeful around the whole thing. Tonight, for about three hours, Broadway will do the one thing I’ve increasingly learned it almost never does: it will sell Broadway. The whole of it. (Kind of.)

P!nk will host (inevitably suspended from the rafters like a goddess) from Radio City, the main ceremony on CBS and Paramount+ (with the design and craft awards handed out first on a free Pluto pre-show). For one night (and one night only) the entire industry roots for the entire industry. At least on the surface. (Nevermind the burnt out teams rooting for their shows and seething when they don’t take home the prize.) In any case, we make a good show of it. (Naturally.)

Then Monday comes, and we go back to business as usual: Every show for itself. Team against team, agency against agency, producer against producer. Is it always really that way? No, sometimes it’s not. But I continue to be shocked by how territorial this business is. How often we get in our own way, even on the same project—one team thwarting another for a semblance of control over a show’s narrative. In one way, it makes sense. When people are scared, they try to hoard what they have. Generosity can only come from a place of confidence. Have you seen the grosses year over year? Of course folks are panicked.

But we’ll get back to that—let’s return to the ceremony.

Tonight’s Awards are split into two. The design and craft awards go out on a free Pluto pre-show before most people have tuned in. The main event is on CBS, the stream on Paramount+. Attending in person is its own wall: tonight’s public seats run from a limited $495 ‘rush’ batch to about $937 at face value, with resale balcony going well past a thousand, in a hall that seats six thousand. The live at-home audience bounced back last year, up 44% and the biggest since 2019 (Variety), so despite overall awards shows having dwindling audiences and the Tonys being the smallest among them, our audience—relative to our prior years—holds. But the weight of the night has moved. What matters by Monday won’t be who watched live so much as, of course, who won, but also what gets clipped, memed, and passed around.

I’ve been lucky to attend the awards twice, and each time I was fascinated by what performances fell flat in the room but telegraphed ingeniously on TV, and vice versa. Things in the room that I was like oh WOW that is fantastic it’s going to sell tickets, I’d find online afterwards, see the clip, and then read the reactions of disappointed fans. In any case, the clips certainly matter more than the performance for the 6,000.

Does winning the Tonys actually impact ticket sales anymore? The bump exists, and it’s grown. But it’s also finite. Since 2010, the Best Musical winner’s grosses have risen an average of 29% in the six weeks after the win, and after the pandemic that climbed to about 35% (BroadwayWorld). The biggest jumps went to the shows that historically needed them, Memphis up 51%, A Gentleman’s Guide up 43%. The juggernauts moved more minimally, Hamilton up 14%, The Book of Mormon up 8%, because they were already full. And it saves fewer shows than the mythology claims. Company won five Tonys in 2022 and posted its closing notice weeks later. Roughly two-thirds of the nominees that don’t win are gone by year’s end. The trophy is a spotlight. It is not a life raft.

And notice what all of these numbers have in common. The record is a grosses record. The bump is a grosses bump. “Best year ever” is a revenue figure. We keep score in the one metric that hides the problem, because grosses can climb on price while the seats empty out (Part 1). The economic vitality of this whole business has arguably never been more precarious, record grosses and all.

That precariousness—or, spun more positively, our evolving audience behavior—is our current thruline. A record built on price, not attendance (Part 1). A nervous, top-heavy economy where the wallet flinches (Part 2). A tourist audience that didn’t return and won’t on the old timeline (Part 3). A buyer who got smarter and more self-sufficient than our marketing assumes (Part 4). And a younger, more diverse audience arriving, with a far larger one we still haven’t reached (Part 5). Each facet of this “new Broadway” is real and relevant. All of Broadway needs to evolve in kind. But there’s one precariousness (or, again, put positively: opportunity) we haven’t hit yet: Marketing for an individual show can be brilliant (provided teams work with as opposed to against each other, and producers trust the teams they’ve employed). Marketing Broadway, the whole of it, seems hardly to happen at all.

To an extent, I understand why. We are too busy surviving our own show to grow the category that feeds every show. And there’s a harder reason under that one: any real attempt to grow the category via a subscription that bundles multiple shows, a campaign that says “come to Broadway” instead of “come to my show,” means putting wind in a competitor’s sails—whether it’s a different theater owner, a different producer, a different agency. We are so competitive that we can’t stand to do it, even when it would help our own show and the next three we open after it. We treat the audience like a pie. More for your show feels like less for mine. So we guard our slice and call it a plan. (This is short-sighted, as we covered in Part 5, but let’s move forward.)

And here’s the contradiction that I keep noodling over: The same industry that won’t try something new lest it lift up a competitor will, in the next breath, say: we just need the next Lin-Manuel juggernaut, the next Hamilton, and the street will be saved. Don’t grow anyone else’s show, and also, please, someone build the megahit that grows all of us.

A real phenomenon would bring fresh eyes to “the Street.” That part is true. But how far those eyes travel past the one show is mostly assumed, not measured. In the season Hamilton broke, total Broadway attendance rose about 1.6%, in a year stuffed with new shows (38). The halo makes a great story and a thin spreadsheet. And waiting for it, from where I sit as a marketer, is about as lazy a plan as there is.

Waiting for a juggernaut also shortchanges the remarkable work already running each season, eight times a week. Plus, it has the order backwards. We don’t need a savior to go find new audiences. We need to go find the new audiences with the shows we already have. But that requires a mix-up in marketing spend, which will not happen overnight, and, in an already precarious position, producers are hesitant to flip models or make big swings that could bring about real change. We keep picturing growth as a show that hasn’t opened yet, when it’s millions of people who have never been told, in a way that lands, that Broadway is relevant and for them—on platforms where they already engage.

The case and time for telling people that Broadway is for them has never been better, because of what Broadway is (and is not). Not only are we missing out on huge populations because we aren’t sufficiently making or marketing content to them (or allocating those marketing dollars in a way reflective of 2026’s consumer behavior), but also Broadway should have a highly specific appeal at this particular moment. The world has never been more flooded with screens, blue light, the scroll, and omnipresent AI content/conversation/products. People are exhausted and scared and angered by (hello to myriad pro-AI commencement speeches being met with ‘boos’ by graduates) the technology that’s consumed our lives with a promise that so much more (SOS) is on the imminent horizon.

You know where this is going, and lean in, babe: What is fundamentally human? Live, in person storytelling. Music. Art. And yeah, musical theatre. Broadway, baby.

A room full of strangers breathing the same air, hearts beating synchronously, watching living people do a hard, human thing in real time, knowing tonight’s performance has never happened before and never will again. It is deliciously, stubbornly, intrinsically human and analog. In a screen-weary world bracing against the synthetic, that is the most valuable position in entertainment, and Broadway is sitting on it without saying a word. (Anecdotally I saw a great Chase ad today that basically made this positioning for their expanding in person branches and if someone from the Broadway League would like a link I’d be happy to scavenge one as reference.)

So let’s say it. Let’s hype our unfair advantage, our competitive moat. The world is a dumpster fire and (self important though it may sound, but who can blame us because that’s what theater people do) a phone-free space where humans commune around a story is a literal antidote to the bullshit (and fear, and weariness) of this moment.

So what could this campaign look like? A genuine category push, with buy-in from individual shows that decide a bigger room beats a bigger slice, carried mostly by the bodies whose job this already is: NYC’s tourism office, the Broadway League, TDF, the theater owners. The League has done versions of this before. This Is Broadway, in 2021, pulled owners, unions, and rival producers into a single campaign, and it was great. The capacity exists. What’s missing is the sense that this moment is the emergency it really is.

And what once acted as a successful campaign now isn’t built for now. The current examples I can point to are lovely, but admittedly old school. It speaks to the audience theatre had in 1996, not the one it has in 2026.

So what would speak to the one it has? A campaign for Broadway in 2026 lives online first, because that’s where the attention and the clips already are. It sells the feeling, the specific charge of being in the room, not a list of titles. It talks to the forty-one-year-old in the seats now, in their language and on their feed. It reassures the diehards that it sees them, and it tells a brand-new audience the one thing no single show’s ad ever can: you belong here, this is for you, here’s what a night of it feels like. And here’s why—in this particular moment—it’s a balm or escape that may contextualize your sorrow, or heal you with the absurd, or allow you to escape into pure entertainment.

Tonight’s award show may ultimately not be so much a campaign for Broadway as a showcase of products, but it’s still the closest thing to a Broadway ad that we currently have. And for us diehards, it’s also akin to a crossover between a sports game and spiritual event—a night where our child selves feel the most seen and energized, and despite an admittedly odd season, I am looking forward to it.

I’ll be watching, ballot in hand, happily. And I’ll be wishing the category-wide sentiment lasted more than one night a year. Our next audiences are out there, larger and younger and more varied than the one we keep fighting each other over. The only real question is whether we’re brave enough to pull some new levers, action different spend, trust some new audiences. Whether we go find them together, or keep waiting for someone to save a street we could be growing ourselves.

KQ