Broadway performers showcase New York’s resilience through music as recovery from COVID-19 setback continues

The Trump verdict last Thursday overshadowed a far more disturbing portent for New York: yet another daytime attack in the heart of Times Square, the second in a month, this time a machete assault outside a McDonald’s at 45th and Broadway.

New York’s failure to control crime — regular crime, not Trump crime — is slowing its tourism recovery, as new statistics from Broadway’s theater industry show.

Like New York overall, Broadway is having a slow rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Just ahead of the Tony Awards in mid-June, the Broadway League has released annual stats for the playing year that ended last month.

Through May, annual attendance was 12.3 million people — nearly 17% below the 2018-19 level of 14.8 million. Revenue was down 16%, to $1.5 billion.

Though a few blockbuster shows — “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Hamilton” and “The Lion King” (still) — command nosebleed ticket prices of $200 and up, costs overall aren’t deterring visitors.  

The average ticket is $125 per person, not far off the $124 paid in 2019, despite 25% inflation since then.

It’s not for a lack of variety: 21 shows opened this spring, from Ibsen to a musical based on the novel “The Outsiders” — enough to meet everyone’s taste.

And people haven’t lost their love of theater: London’s West End recovered its pre-pandemic crowds way back in 2022, with attendance up 7% versus 2019.

The real problem is the bigger stage of New York City — whose government policies have made it far more expensive to come here and stay for a few days, even as public safety and quality of life have declined.

Last year, the average New York hotel room cost $301, real-estate analysts at CoStar tell me, up 22% since 2019.

A big reason is squeezed supply: We’re missing 7,900 hotel rooms, or 6% of the total, thanks to President Biden’s border crisis.

The city has taken major mid-budget hotels, from The Row on Eighth Avenue to the Roosevelt, a 10-minute walk from Times Square, off the market, booking them entirely for non-paying migrants.

The Adams administration, which once pledged to support New York’s post-COVID recovery, has instead purposely replaced a taxpaying tourist population with a tax-consuming migrant population.

And the city’s failure to police these “newcomers” harms the area’s public safety.

In February, a 15-year-old shoplifting migrant shot and wounded a tourist in a Times Square store. Not exactly great for business.

You can’t blame the migrants for thinking they can get away with lawlessness; they’re just following a “when in Rome” philosophy.

Thursday’s attack outside McDonalds involved three of Times Square’s notorious CD hawkers, who allegedly stabbed and wounded a rival with a machete.

The CD crews are a known menace, obstructing sidewalks to hit up tourists for “tips” for supposedly “free” CDs, and even rifling through tourists’ wallets for large-denomination bills when the victims try to find a few dollars.

But New York failed to stop these chronic low-level crimes before they escalated to a near-murder.

Then there’s our failure to deal with the disorderly and dangerous mentally ill, even after they’ve racked up multiple warning-sign arrests.

Last month, a shelter resident with 14 previous arrests randomly stabbed a Pennsylvania woman who was leading kids on a class trip to New York.

Overall, felony crime in Midtown South, which includes Times Square, remains 50% higher than it was in 2019.

Serious assaults — many of them random — have nearly tripled, from 74 during the first four and a half months of 2019 to 202 this year.

Midtown South hasn’t seen this level of felony assault in at least a quarter-century: Even in 1997, halfway through Rudy Giuliani’s first crime-fighting term, such assaults in the early part of the year reached only 154.

All this chaos impacts people’s livelihoods. As of April, New York was still missing 26,300 leisure and hospitality jobs, or 6% relative to 2019.

The mayor loves to say New York is booming, because we might recover our 2019 tourist numbers by next year.  

But the truth is we are way behind: The country as a whole has 2% more tourism-related jobs than it had in 2019.

And $15 congestion pricing, set to start June 30, is yet another deterrent to regional visitors who might not want to take mass transit home late at night after a show. 

Yes, the show must go on, so it is going on — but with fewer butts in Broadway seats than New York needs to recover.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.