‘Cat’ Ticket Sales Fall Short of Recouping Costs

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Scarlett Johansson in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

The Broadway revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” starring Scarlett Johansson as Maggie the Cat, fell short of recouping its $3.6 million capitalization before ending its 15-week run on Saturday, a spokeswoman for the show said on Monday.

While only 25 percent of Broadway shows ever turn a profit, this “Cat” was initially seen as a likely moneymaker given the star billing of Ms. Johansson, who had proven herself on Broadway in the 2010 revival of “A View From the Bridge” (for which she won a Tony Award) and seemed a natural fit as the sexy, fierce Maggie. The producers were so confident that they provided Ms. Johansson a star salary minimum of $40,000 a week.

The challenges facing the revival began with the show’s theater, the Richard Rodgers. The producers had hoped to mount the play in a 1,100-seat Broadway playhouse, which would have provided atmospheric intimacy; none were available, however, so the play went into the 1,400-seat Rodgers, traditionally a musical theater house. Not only did the production feel somewhat swallowed by the large space, the actors often found themselves speaking at a loud pitch just to hear each other - and some of the early buzz on the show rapped actors for seemingly shouting.

The critics’ reviews in January were mixed; several praised Ms. Johansson, but the takeaway was that the revival was not a must-see. And given that this was the third “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” on Broadway in just the last decade, audience demand for another staging of the show may have been modest to begin with.

Ticket sales began to slide after the reviews were published and never really recovered. Its final week was one of its strongest at the box office, which is typical for a show about to close; for the seven performances last week, “Cat” grossed $721,456, or 63 percent of the maximum potential amount. Still, only 80 percent of the seats were sold for that final week. Had the show been in a smaller playhouse, of course, the gross potential would have been higher and there would have been more sold-out performances. But whether the show would have recouped in a smaller theater is impossible to predict.

Stuart Thompson, the play’s lead producer and a Broadway veteran on several Tony-winning shows (“The Book of Mormon,” “God of Carnage”), declined to comment this week. Asked if the show had recouped, the show’s spokeswoman simply replied, “Not quite,” and declined further comment.