BUFFALO — “The Addams Family” musical will close on Broadway next Saturday without earning back its $16.5 million capitalization during its 22-month run, a disappointment to the producers. Yet the national tour production of “The Addams Family” was a hit this month at Shea’s Performing Arts Center in Buffalo, grossing $995,000 in a week, more than most shows pull in on Broadway — including “The Addams Family,” which hasn’t earned that much money in a week since April.
Only 20 to 30 percent of Broadway shows ever turn a profit, but even the flops — and certainly blockbusters like “Wicked” and “The Lion King” — can make millions on the road. And few cities, it turns out, are as profitable as Buffalo, chiefly because of the huge and loyal base of subscribers at Shea’s, an 85-year-old, 3,000-seat theater designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany that sits like a monument on the city’s Main Street.
The profits here are so great that one actor at the “Addams Family” cast party offered a toast to (in theater lingo) the “overages.” The morning after, the two men most responsible for bringing Broadway to Buffalo — Albert Nocciolino, upstate New York ’s most powerful tour presenter, and Anthony Conte, the president of Shea’s — were still laughing about the tribute.
“I bet we end up having one of the highest profit margins on the ‘Addams Family’ tour,” Mr. Nocciolino said between bites of an omelet breakfast. “We certainly have with several other tours.”
Buffalo has emerged as a major bellwether in commercial theater, which while centered on Broadway relies heavily on tours, which now gross more than $1 billion a year, or at least as much as Broadway itself.
Like theaters in Cleveland and Sacramento, Shea’s in Buffalo has become important because of its reliable subscribers — 13,100 for each of its six one-week Broadway tours this year. An impressive 85 percent renew annually; the subscriber base insures that 55 percent of seats are bought even before tickets go on general sale.
“The industry has noticed how good it is to play Buffalo,” said Stuart Oken, a lead producer of “The Addams Family,” who pointed out that the show made more money per performance here than in Toronto, Miami or any other city since the tour began in September. He predicted that the tour would make a profit because of moneymakers like Buffalo and return some of the money lost on Broadway to investors.
Jeffrey Seller, a Tony Award-winning producer whose musicals “Rent,” “Avenue Q” and “In the Heights” all played Shea’s, described the theater as a “miracle of the Rust Belt,” given that the Buffalo economy has struggled mightily through both good times and bad.
“I’ve come to covet a subscription slot in Buffalo because I know we’re in profit before they have begun selling single tickets,” Mr. Seller said.
Nowhere have so-called road presenters like Mr. Nocciolino and Mr. Conte become more visible tastemakers than during the Tony Awards competition each May and June. About 15 percent of Tony voters are from “the road,” and they are courted heavily by nominees and producers during parties in New York each spring. In recent voting for the best-musical Tony, which is the one award seen as influencing ticket sales, some theater executives believe that votes from road presenters helped “Billy Elliot” prevail over “Next to Normal” in 2009, and “Memphis” over “Fela” in 2010, because the two winners were likely to have big tours — and a best-musical Tony is seen as helping sell tickets on the road.
Several of these road presenters said in interviews that touring potential was a factor in their Tony votes, but noted that they voted chiefly on artistic merit.
“I’m a human being, so to say how a show would play in Cleveland is not a factor in Tony voting would not be true,” said Gina Vernaci, vice president of theatricals at Cleveland PlayhouseSquare, another prime destination for tours. “But Cleveland wants quality shows, artistically compelling shows, enjoyable shows, as much as New Yorkers.”
Mr. Conte, a former banker in Buffalo and Shea’s board member who became president of the theater in 2000, recalled admiring the Broadway show “Spring Awakening” but voted for “Mary Poppins” instead for best musical that year. He said “the tough love story,” flashes of nudity, and dark themes of “Spring Awakening” were “not my thing,” and he also did not envision the show as appealing to his subscribers. “Spring Awakening” went on to win the Tony for best musical; the show’s national tour had a brief run at the University at Buffalo, but not at Shea’s.
“We know our territory here,” Mr. Conte said. “We know that the audience is on the conservative side. When I vote on the Tonys and book shows, I’m representing my audience.”
After years as a movie palace, Shea’s was nearly torn down in the 1970s because of its owner’s business problems, but squatters occupied the theater and refused to leave. Now, with more than 250 performances each year, the theater stands as a majestic example of Spanish and French Baroque design as well as one of the busiest centers of life in a downtown dotted with vacant storefronts.
Even as many commercial and nonprofit theaters are struggling to hold onto subscribers, Shea’s has had a large and stable base for several years, explained by both demographic and cultural reasons.
Buffalo has long had a “season ticket” mentality to muddle through the cold months: just as people are used to buying season tickets for the Bills and the Sabres, the city’s football and hockey teams, they are open to buying season subscriptions for Broadway tours, Mr. Nocciolino said. The city (and Cleveland as well) is full of descendants of Eastern European immigrants, who, theater executives in the two cities believe, came from backgrounds where theater was appreciated.
Being near New York City means subscribers already know the Broadway brand, though Mr. Conte says they would tend to favor a 1950s-style jukebox musical like “Million Dollar Quartet” more than a punk rock show like “American Idiot,” which will go to cities like Chicago and Los Angeles but is not expected to play Shea’s.
Still, Mr. Conte and Mr. Nocciolino resist the idea that they favor easy crowd-pleasers over more challenging fare. Mr. Conte, for instance, recalled wanting to bolt a performance of “In the Heights” on Broadway in 2008 because he was turned off by an early scene that unfolded in rap.
“I turned to my wife and said, ‘I don’t think I can sit through all this;, I can’t see it playing well in Buffalo.’ ” Mr. Conte said. “But she reminded me I couldn’t leave because I was a Tony voter. So I started listening to what the characters were actually saying, and soon I was drawn in. I totally loved it.”
Mr. Nocciolino, who books Broadway tours at theaters in several upstate cities, including Rochester, Syracuse, Elmira and Albany, said he believed that both risky and traditional Broadway productions would likely find audiences so long as the advertising and ticket pricing were right.
During a planning and marketing meeting at Shea’s this month, Mr. Nocciolino peppered the business staff members for precise details about plans for a huge highway billboard for Shea’s shows. (This season’s Broadway series at Shea’s is made up of “The Lion King,” “Million Dollar Quartet,” “The Addams Family,” “Les Miserables,” “South Pacific,” and, yes, the Tony-winning “Memphis.”) With ticket sales running strong for “Les Miserables,” which is coming for the fourth time, he urged scrapping a billboard for that show and instead using the space to promote the theater’s run of the Beatles’ tribute concert “Rain,” which isn’t part of the Broadway series.
The meeting soon turned to a discussion of the Broadway musicals in the 2012-13 tour series at Shea’s, which will be announced in the spring. The big question among the staff was whether Mr. Nocciolino and Mr. Conte would book the biggest critical and commercial hit musical on Broadway in years, “The Book of Mormon.” The two men would not disclose their plans with a reporter in the room, but Mr. Nocciolino revealed that one of the show’s lead producers, Scott Rudin, had met with him and a few other national presenters to learn about their markets, subscriptions and how the show might be booked there.
The Shea’s staff members were all but bursting in their enthusiasm for “Mormon.” To their delight, Mr. Conte and Mr. Nocciolino disclosed that they were eager to bring the show to Buffalo too, seeing its loving send-up of organized religion as far sweeter and funnier than, say, “Spring Awakening.”
“As long as we make sure subscribers know it’s irreverent, we’ve done our job and subscribers will continue to trust our taste,” Mr. Conte said. “And I think Buffalo would love ‘Mormon’ as much as they do in Manhattan.”
An article on Dec. 24 about the success of touring Broadway shows at Shea’s Performing Arts Center in Buffalo misstated the name of a local university where “Spring Awakening,” which the president of Shea’s thought would not appeal to his subscribers, had a brief run. It is the University at Buffalo, which is part of the State University of New York system; it is not the University of Buffalo.