LONDON—When Sara Weinstock began booking theater tickets for a trip to London, she figured she had made a math error.
“We’ve got to be messing up the exchange rate or something, right?” the Virginia theater fan recalls. “There’s no way that those tickets are that cheap. We were shocked.”
She ended up seeing four West End shows—more than she typically attends on trips to New York, where surging production costs have made a night at the theater a special-occasion expense.
Weinstock’s experience is a sign of thriving times for London’s fabled theater district. The West End has bounced back from the pandemic far stronger than Broadway, taking the lead in total admissions and luring more American theatergoers and producers.
Long a testing ground for shows that go on to excel in New York, the West End is capitalizing on lower production costs, cheaper ticket prices and government tax relief to drive attendances to new heights.
A record 17.64 million tickets were sold for West End shows last year, nearly three million more than Broadway, according to the Society of London Theatre. Revenue rose about 4% to the equivalent of roughly $1.35 billion.
West End attendances are now 15% above prepandemic levels, while Broadway’s total audience has ticked down slightly, according to data from the Broadway League.
“The theater owners have never had it so good,” said Matthew Byam Shaw, a veteran theater producer and executive producer of the Netflix series “The Crown,” which began as a West End play. An abundance of viable shows means venues can cherry-pick the ones they want to host, he said.
While Broadway has historically led on revenue, London’s centuries-old playwriting heritage has long made audiences and producers more open to new works. Lower production costs also help.
Staging a show in New York now costs three to five times what it does in London, producers say. Labor is a big factor: Broadway productions must navigate 13 separate entertainment unions, compared with just three in the West End. Broadway actors earn a minimum of $2,717 a week, while West End minimums vary between the equivalent of $1,000 and $1,200.
While energy, marketing and material costs have risen on both sides of the Atlantic since the pandemic, they remain much higher in the U.S.
“I remember when I first started out, the rule of thumb was: If you’re taking your show from London to Broadway, you change the pound sign to a dollar sign and add a zero at the end,” said Eleanor Lloyd, founder of Eleanor Lloyd Productions. “In New York, if you want someone to turn on a light switch, it’s a four-hour minimum call at double time. In London, we just go turn on the light switch ourselves.”
One of Lloyd’s London plays, “Shifters,” is currently playing in the off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theater. Staging it in the West End cost the equivalent of about $600,000. On Broadway, she estimates, it would have cost $5 million to $6 million.
Producers say the cost differences have made creative risk-taking more viable in the West End. “Shifters,” a love story between a young Black couple, wasn’t a guaranteed hit. In London, it broke even or lost money in its first weeks before word-of-mouth caught on and it could raise ticket prices. “My sense is that on Broadway, we probably would have lost our shirts in the first two weeks,” Lloyd said.
Even megahit creators are feeling the crunch. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” had everything going for it: three Tony Awards, rave reviews and packed houses. Yet, the production announced it was closing after just five months on Broadway, undone by the prohibitive cost of running a musical in New York.
“The painful truth is that… bringing almost any new show to Broadway makes little financial sense,” Lloyd Webber said in a recent social-media post. “Without investors willing to take risks, and artists able to make a living, where will Broadway’s next generation of shows come from?”
Theater investors and producers say London offers shows more runway to survive.
Still, the West End hasn’t been spared the squeeze as rising costs outpace inflation and compress profit margins. Postpandemic ticket prices have fallen 5.3% in real terms to keep theaters filled, and producers are finding it tougher to balance the books. But even with mounting pressures, producers say financial risks are more manageable than on Broadway.
Government support also helps. The U.K.’s Theatre Tax Relief hands non-touring productions a 40% tax credit, reimbursing producers for nearly half their upfront costs. The measure was made permanent in 2024.
“It’s been a really important game-changer,” says the producer Byam Shaw. “It’s also encouraged us to put on more diverse and interesting productions as a result, which could have been very risky before.”
Lower costs and government support allow West End theaters to sell tickets for less than on Broadway and still make money.
Most West End tickets go for the equivalent of $75 or less; more than a quarter sell under $47 and less than 4% top $200. The average ticket on Broadway, meanwhile, costs about $131.
The vibrant ecosystem is driving growing American commercial interest in the West End.
“I’m seeing more and more American producer-investors over here,” said Nica Burns, a producer whose Nimax Theatres group owns six West End venues including the Palace, home to “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”
“The economic model is so much better. It’s as simple as that. The costs are lower, ticket prices are lower. So more people come because they can afford it,” Burns said.
A network of government-subsidized theaters across England also offers a structural advantage that Broadway lacks, giving producers a place to develop work before it reaches the West End—what insiders historically refer to as the “right to fail.”
Take “Operation Mincemeat,” a hit World War II musical comedy, which began with a modest government grant and ran in several small theaters before its lengthy sold-out West End run. It’s now a hot ticket on Broadway.
It’s that overall environment that offers a lifeline to the next generation of shows, said Hannah Essex, co-chief executive of the Society of London Theatre.
“The whole piece together creates this pipeline that fuels the West End and then also fuels Broadway,” she said.
Write to Julia Amann at julia.amann@wsj.com