LONDON
Section 1 of 6
Shaftesbury Avenue is a business model, not a street
Forty-odd commercial houses inside a mile, most of them Victorian or Edwardian, and an audience that mostly does not live in the city. The West End can hold a title through a decade of soft weeks because the room refills from somewhere else each month — which is a genuinely unusual way to run a live industry, and the one London built its economics on.
In this section — 3 pieces
- The same show is two businesses on two streetslongA West End run and a Broadway run of the same title have different capitalisation, different weekly costs and different definitions of success. The show does not change; the arithmetic does.
- Nearly every house sits in one of two small gridsmediumLondon’s theatre district is walkable in twenty minutes and New York’s is smaller still. Concentration is the whole industry’s operating condition.
- A London run is sold to people who do not live theremediumThe West End’s audience is substantially visiting, which changes what can run for years and what closes in months.