Beatles Tribute Says Goodbye to Broadway Three Months Early
The Beatles revue that hit Broadway just last month will wrap up its run months early amidst poor ticket sales. According to the New York Times, Let It Be will cut its Broadway run short by over three months; the tribute show was scheduled to run through December 29th, but will now close on September 1st.
Beatles Revue Opens on Broadway
Let It Be opened July 24th at the St. James Theater in New York to fairly positive reviews, but summer ticket sales have been “more challenging than expected.” Producers say the show has been played to more than 50,000 viewers on Broadway, pulling in between $2 and $2.4 million. In comparison, the British version – which debuted in September 2012 – is set to run at London’s Savoy Theater through next January and has played to 250,000 people, earning more than $14 million.
The show is also still mired in a legal disagreement: The producers of Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles, a similar musical tribute that ran on Broadway from October 2010 to July 2011, have filed suit against Let It Be‘s producers, claiming they lifted elements of their show.
Let It Be will still live on, though. The show’s producers aim to use the cast and parts of the physical production in a traveling version in North America in 2014 and 2015, and they’re also planning visits to Russia, Japan and Monaco.