'Kids Night on Broadway' Promotion Proves Broadway Doesn't Really Care About Kids Coming To Shows
Greg Ehrhardt, OnStage Blog Editorial Staff
The Broadway League announced this week that ‘Kids Night on Broadway’ will be returning to New York City in 2023. This is a promotion Broadway runs across the country that offers kids free tickets to a Broadway show in an effort to, amongst other things, get kids introduced to Broadway shows and hopefully hooked. As their press release noted, people who get introduced to Broadway at a young age tend to become fanatics at a higher rate than people introduced to Broadway shows as adults.
Kids will also receive activity books, participation in talkbacks, and other freebies to be announced.
This, of course, is wonderful on its face. As Chris Peterson noted in his piece earlier this year (and of course is known by anyone who has attended a show within the last few years), Broadway shows are expensive to the point that its unrealistic to hope that young families can take their kids to any type of show without having significant financial means.
So, of course, Broadway should get significant accolades for continuing this promotion since 1996, right?
Well, yes, until you read the details.
The first event for New York City is scheduled for March 21st, 2023.
Let’s stop there. The press release does not mention what day of the week this is, so I’ll save you the time and tell you if you haven’t guessed already.
It is on a Tuesday.
A Tuesday in the middle of March.
It is not only on a school night but on one of the most common nights of the week for youngsters to have activities after school.
This is not helpful to families looking for a way to introduce their kids to Broadway on a budget.
Oh, but maybe it’s during Spring Break week?
Well, spring break weeks do vary by city and state, but most schools, including New York City Public Schools, have their spring break between April 8th and April 14th.
So yes, Broadway is running a free kids ticket promotion on a Tuesday night in March, when so many kids will have school the next day, homework to do, and likely scheduled activities they would have to skip to attend the show.
To quote a famous Mad Men gif, “Not Great Bob!”
Tuesdays are the 2nd slowest night of the week, behind Wednesdays for attendance. They have seats to give away. In fact, if you really want to look at this cynically, they might be gaining some money from getting parents to buy tickets to shows they wouldn’t normally go to.
It’s always about the money.
(To get an obvious rebuttal out of the way, yes, Kids Night on Broadway held events during the summer in Schenectady, NY and San Jose CA. These places ain’t New York City, if it needs to be said.)
Let’s read the details about parent tickets. One would hope they would be discounted too, maybe not free, but something to not make it feel like a burden to go, especially for a parent who may not be as enthused to go to a Broadway show.
Nope. A free ticket will only be given provided the child goes with an adult who pays the full ticket price.
So, it is not “really” a free ticket, it’s a “buy one, get one free” promotion, or, a 50% off two tickets promotion.
Ok, this may seem reasonable, they can’t let adults in for free, otherwise adults would just take any kid they could find and bring them so they can get a free ticket.
But what about a family featuring a married couple and three kids? Well, the 3rd kid would have to be admitted on a full-price ticket.
How about a single parent with 2-3 kids or more? Sorry, only one kid can go for free. The other kids can stay at home or pay full price tickets.
Are we starting to see how limited this promotion really is? It only really “works” financially for a single-parent household with one kid (assuming a single parent can even afford a full price ticket), a married-parent household with 1-2 kids, or a family where an even amount of parents and kids are only interested in the Broadway show.
It also works if the family has financial means, but those families don’t need this promotion to go to a show.
So to summarize: Yes, Broadway is giving away free tickets to a show (a limited set of shows at that, which, if history is any guide, mostly won’t appeal to kids, but we won’t go there today), but only on a date when they probably have tickets to give away.
So, congratulations?
“But Greg, why are you being so negative? Charity is still charity”
Here’s a good rule of thumb about charity: the more stipulations you have to give charity, the less charitable you’re actually being. Imagine going to a homeless man and saying, “I’ll buy you a meal, but it has to be at a delicatessen my friend owns that has food to give away, and you have to go during hours where there’s nobody there, which is only really on or about every 12th Wednesday at 3:45 pm.
Is that “really” charity?
These types of stipulations show why Broadway still doesn’t get it. They are increasingly becoming dependent on tourists and wealthy white locals for their business instead of being a realistic option for people on a budget. It runs a free kids ticket promotion, but only on the slowest day of the week on a school night in the middle of a cold month, and it only really makes financial sense for families with 1 or 2 kids.
Yes, kudos for sponsoring a free kids ticket night 50% off two tickets night. But how about doing it when kids are actually available to attend! Do a special abbreviated performance on a Sunday morning just for kids before the matinee performance. Do it on a Tuesday during the Summer: better yet, do a special performance on a Monday during the Summer when most shows are dark anyways. Who cares if you lose some money. Most of these kids will pay it back in spades for the next 50 years!
Sure, I bet Broadway is congratulating themselves for having this promotion since 1996. However, Broadway is in increasing danger of becoming irrelevant to the next generations. Audiences are still not where they were pre-pandemic, and its not all because of covid. (For example, is there going to be a single kid under 18 excited for the new Back to the Future Musical? That’s for another column).
Broadway has built a business model where they are dependent on every last dollar for every possible show, otherwise they will lose money. This is a business model that cannot sustain itself in the long run. If you have an environment where costs are rising significantly (yep), and you respond by doubling down on older customers nostalgia (yep), and raising ticket prices (yep), your business will not survive in the long run.
You must have fresh new products regularly. You must have a healthy supply of new customers. You must have new products that appeal to new customers.
There’s only so much juice to squeeze out of the same orange, and I’m sorry, a free kids night on a Tuesday in March is not buying a new orange. It’s taking a scrap of the orange peel, giving it to the dog, and saying “Take it, and you’ll like it.”
I’ll end on this note: I will expect a rebuttal from Broadway that their program can’t be that onerous to attend, since they claim over 180,000 kids have participated in the program. That number seems impressive, until you do the math.
180,000 kids over 25 years works out to about 7,300 kids per year, which seems like a lot, until you remember they are likely counting promotions done around the country (like the one happening January 25th in San Diego), and they sometimes do multiple promotions per city, per year.
Also, we have around 50 million kids ages 6-18 in the United States. So, for any given year, they attract about 1 hundredth of 1 percent of eligible kids to see a show.
It is suddenly not as impressive.
The point is not to say this promotion has been a failure. The point is, Broadway can do better, that is, if they want to do better. I’m not at all convinced they want to do better based on what is happening in 2023.