Three Broadway Shows Exit This Weekend as Summer Exodus Begins

The Balusters, Chess, and Celebrity Autobiography all take their final bows this week, with limited runs ending and thin summer houses doing the rest of the work.

The Balusters closes this weekend after its scheduled limited engagement concludes.
Chess exits Broadway simultaneously, citing the end of its contracted run.
Celebrity Autobiography also shutters this weekend, rounding out a mass Broadway departure.
The three closings mark the beginning of Broadway's annual summer thinning, when attendance and new productions both fall sharply.
No transfer or extension announcements have accompanied any of the three departures.

Three Broadway productions will go dark this weekend in what Deadline is calling the start of the season’s summer exodus: The Balusters, Chess, and Celebrity Autobiography each play their final performances within days of each other.

The Balusters and Chess both conclude scheduled limited runs, the kind of exit that press materials tend to describe as “always planned.” Celebrity Autobiography, which built its format around readings of actual celebrity memoirs performed by rotating casts, departs without a transfer announcement or a stated successor venue.

Broadway’s summer thinning is a documented annual pattern — tourism picks up, but so does competition from outdoor events, and shows with soft advance sales rarely survive the July calendar intact. The three this weekend represent the leading edge rather than the full wave.

Chess, the 1984 Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus musical that dramatizes a Cold War chess match and has accumulated more revival attempts than most shows accumulate reviews, closes again. No word yet on when it will be back.