Melinda's Board: Entertainment 2night

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Broadway Box - Office Receipts Climb
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 6:50 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- As theater performers recorded a spirited rendition of ``New York, New York'' to help bring audiences back to Broadway, producers announced the latest box-office figures: ticket sales are up, but there's still a long way to go.

Total box-office take for the week was more than $7.3 million, up from a disastrous $3.6 million during the week terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and shows played only five performances instead of the customary eight.

Suffering the most were the long-running musicals, according to the announcement released Tuesday by the League of American Theatres and Producers.

``Les Miserables,'' for example, saw grosses rise from $94,515 to $167,197. But the British blockbuster still played to less than 30 percent of capacity. ``The Phantom of the Opera'' did slightly better, jumping from $185,490 to $273,656 or about 35 percent of capacity.

Meanwhile, ``The Music Man'' was expected to close Sunday if it didn't get across-the-board union cuts given to ``Les Miserables,'' ``Phantom'' and four other musicals. While its box-office receipts rose from $67,206 to $212,144, the revival of the Meredith Willson musical was playing at only 45 percent of capacity.

At ``The Producers,'' every seat and every standing-room slot were sold, according to spokesman John Barlow, grossing $982,952 up from the five-performance figure of $546,858.

``The Rocky Horror Show,'' went out at standing room only, selling out for its final eight performances with the help of the half-price ticket booth in Times Square and discount sales. It was one of five productions that closed last Sunday.

Some shows seemed to be holding their own. ``Kiss Me, Kate,'' which did $331,673 the week before the World Trade Center attacks, grossed $344,200 the week following the attacks. The musical played to about 55 percent of capacity each week, not particularly robust business.

``We did OK,'' Berlind said Tuesday. ``But it was a little deceptive because people were coming to (what were to have been) the last two or three performances and they didn't find out until they got there, that it wasn't. That could have created some artificial demand.''

The show's two stars, Burke Moses and Carolee Carmello, were among the more than 100 celebrities who gathered for the recording.

The session was done in a cramped studio on 48th Street, two blocks west of Broadway, where everyone from Molly (Ringwald) to Matthew (Broderick) to Bernadette (Peters) to Nathan (Lane) to Susan (Lucci) to a pigtailed Bebe (Neuwirth) worked their way through the Kander and Ebb anthem made famous by Frank Sinatra and Liza Minnelli.

Music director John McDaniel laid down the music and vocal tracks for a music video that will be filmed Friday in Times Square featuring the casts -- in costume -- from all the Broadway shows plus other theater celebrities.

``Years ago, I used to sing in the choruses of Broadway shows,'' said Valerie Harper, currently starring in the comedy ``The Tale of the Allergist's Wife.''

``I'm somewhere between an alto and a soprano,'' she said.

The video will be used as part of an extensive advertising campaign to be shown on television and as trailers in movie theaters to get audiences back to the theater.

``Start again from the D sharp,'' said McDaniel, as the stars and chorus members from current Broadway musicals broke into song.

It was eerily appropriate: ``We'll make a brand new start of it in old New York, come on, come through New York, New York.''

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Ok, they just showed basically the same thing on Entertainment Tonight too. They were singing New York, New York. And they had a short interview with Bernadette.