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Streisand's New Year's Eve Show In Vegas Set Box-Office Record
The MGM Grand in Las Vegas reports that, as expected, Barbra Streisand 's New Year's Eve performance at the venue set a single-concert box-office record, taking in nearly $14.7 million. With ticket prices that ranged between $500 and $2,500, the concert was also one of the highest-priced shows in history.
In a press release issued today, MGM Grand Entertainment President Richard Sturm announced that Streisand's Dec. 31 performance sold out all 12,488 tickets. According to industry trade magazine Pollstar, the previous single-show gross record was $13.4 million by the Three Tenors (Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and Jose Carreras) at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., on July 20, 1996.
Many of the highest-priced tickets for Streisand's New Year's Eve performance were purchased by the MGM casino itself to give to its high rollers, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal.
Streisand also performed a New Year's Day concert, which her publicist said may have been her last U.S. concert performance. (Streisand is slated to play two stadium shows in Australia in March.) That show was first planned as a private, invitation-only show for a television taping, but when tickets to the New Year's Eve show sold quickly, the MGM offered about 4,000 tickets at the same prices for the Jan. 1 show. The MGM hasn't released the number of tickets sold for that event, but the Review-Journal reported that many tickets were still available in mid-December.
The second-highest concert gross of the New Year's Eve weekend was Phish 's Dec. 30-31 concert/sleepover at Florida's Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation, which took in $11,639,550 on 75,000 tickets sold, according to Amusement Business.
