NEW YORK, NY.- It was four years ago — on March 12, 2020 — that the coronavirus brought the curtain down on Broadway for what was initially supposed to be a monthlong shutdown but which wound up lasting a year and a half.

The pandemic brought live events and big gatherings to a halt, silencing orchestras, shutting museums and movie theaters, and leaving sports teams playing to empty stadiums dotted with cardboard cutouts.

Now, four years later, audiences are coming back, but the recovery has been uneven. Here is a snapshot of where things stand now:

Broadway audiences are still down 17% from pre-pandemic levels.

On Broadway, overall attendance is still down about 17%: 9.3 million seats have been filled in the current season as of March 3, down from 11.1 million at the same point in 2020. Box office grosses are down, too: Broadway shows have grossed $1.2 billion so far this season, 14% below the level in early March of 2020.

Broadway has always had more flops than successes, and the post-pandemic period has been challenging for producers and investors, especially those involved in new musicals. Three pop productions that have opened since the pandemic — “Six,” about the wives of King Henry VIII; “MJ,” about Michael Jackson; and “& Juliet,” which imagines an alternate history for Shakespeare’s tragic heroine — are ongoing hits, but far more musicals have flamed out. The industry is looking with some trepidation toward next month, when a large crop of new shows is set to open.

Many nonprofit theaters around the country are also struggling — attracting fewer subscribers and producing fewer shows — and some have closed. One bright spot has been the touring Broadway market, which has been booming. — MICHAEL PAULSON

Sales for the biggest pop concerts are up 65%.

After a fitful recovery, the pop touring industry has now reached record highs, enabled by superstar tours, pent-up fan demand and ever-higher ticket prices.

The top 100 tours around the world generated $9.2 billion in ticket sales last year — a record by far, according to trade publication Pollstar, which tracks touring data. That was up an astonishing 65% from 2019. The average ticket price last year was $131, up 23% from 2022, which accounts for some of the jump. Concert attendance climbed about 18% last year, to 70 million.

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour was the biggest of many success stories, estimated at just over $1 billion in ticket sales, a new high (with dozens of dates still to come in 2024). According to numbers crunched by Pollstar, Swifties paid an average of $239 per ticket to see her show.

Not every artist is celebrating the post-pandemic touring boom, though. Those who operate below the level of arenas and amphitheaters — and lack the promotional apparatus of a Swift or a Beyoncé — have been sounding an alarm about skyrocketing costs and continuing supply-chain issues that have eroded profit margins and made touring riskier and more expensive for non-superstars. — BEN SISARIO

There are 4,800 fewer movie screens.

Thanks to “Barbie,” “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” the 2023 domestic box office, which includes the United States and Canada, took in close to $9 billion. That’s a marked increase from 2022 but still not at pre-pandemic levels, when theaters reliably sold $11 billion in tickets annually.

Fewer films were released in 2023: There were 125 wide releases, down from 138 in 2019, said David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers. Some films were delayed by the writers’ and actors’ strikes, which shut down Hollywood for close to six months

The number of screens across the country has also declined. Some independent theater chains like Pacific Theaters and ArcLight Cinemas went out of business. And the top three U.S. chains, AMC, Regal and Cinemark, shut about 1,000 screens collectively, according to David Hancock, chief analyst for cinema at Omdia, a London-based research company. He said that at the end of 2023, there were 36,369 screens in the country, down 12% from the 41,172 screens before the shutdown. — NICOLE SPERLING

Orchestra ticket sales are up 2%, but some opera companies are struggling.

Many orchestras are beginning to return to, or even exceed, pre-pandemic levels. The number of tickets that orchestras sold increased by 2% in 2023 compared with 2019, according to a study of 42 medium- and large-sized orchestras by TRG Arts, an analytics firm, in partnership with the League of American Orchestras. Some continue to struggle, though, and some are giving fewer performances than they used to.

The Philadelphia Orchestra is averaging 78% attendance so far this season, compared with 63% before the pandemic. The New York Philharmonic, which completed a $550 million renovation of its hall in 2022 that made it more audience-friendly and reduced its seating capacity, is averaging 85% attendance this season compared with 74% before the pandemic. The San Francisco Symphony has had 74% attendance so far this season, slightly ahead of where it was before the shutdown, but it has fewer performances. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is now averaging 89% attendance, back where it was before the pandemic, even as the number of subscribers has fallen to 6,409 from 8,791.

But the Detroit Symphony Orchestra said that its attendance had fallen to 59% through March this season, down from 74% in the same period during the 2019-20 season, a drop it attributed to a loss of subscribers who have yet to return.

Many opera companies have had a hard time, as the cost of staging live opera — which requires sets, costumes, singers, chorus members and large orchestras — has risen. Ticket revenues at opera houses across the nation were down by about 22% last season compared with 2018-19, according to a recent study by Opera America, a nonprofit group, which said that so far this season, revenues are up.

At the Metropolitan Opera in New York, paid attendance is about 73% so far this season, compared with 71% at the same point in 2019-20, when fears of the pandemic were already beginning to keep operagoers away. And the Met now gives fewer performances overall. The pandemic has seriously strained the Met’s finances: The company has withdrawn about $70 million from its endowment over the past two seasons.

Many leading dance companies have largely bounced back from the disruption brought by COIVD. Attendance at New York City Ballet so far this season is at 79%, compared with 73% before the pandemic, and San Francisco Ballet is at 78% attendance, compared with 66% in the 2019-20 season. — JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ

Museum attendance is mixed.

While some major museums have been able to regain lost ground, others are still seeing fewer visitors, which continues to strain their already-stretched finances.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York reported nearly 861,000 visitors last year, a 26% decline from about 1.2 million visitors before the pandemic, when its Hilma af Klint exhibition set new attendance records. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has seen a 15% decline over the same period, to 5.8 million visitors from 6.8 million, which could be partially attributed to the loss of its Met exhibition space at the Breuer building on Madison Avenue. And the Art Institute of Chicago said that attendance had also decreased by about 15% since the shutdown with about 1.3 million visitors in 2023, saying that while it now has more paid local visitors than it did before the pandemic, there are still fewer international visitors.

Some regional organizations — relying more on local populations than international tourists — have seen stronger comebacks. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston said that it had experienced a 20% increase in visitors over the last fiscal year when compared to pre-pandemic levels. “We have also witnessed a change in the demographics of our audience, with a larger percentage of younger visitors, which bodes well for the future,” said Gary Tinterow, the museum’s director and chair.

And the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, which completed a renovation project last year, said that it attracted a record 277,882 visitors last year, up from 240,706 in 2019. — ZACHARY SMALL and ROBIN POGREBIN

Sports fans are back.

Sports fans are back. All four major sports leagues — the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League — had bigger attendance in their most recent regular seasons than they did in 2019, according to a New York Times calculation of the leagues’ data.

The NFL saw the sharpest increase: 18.9 million people in 2023, up 10.9% from the 17 million people in 2019. That is in part because the league added an extra game to the regular-season schedule in 2021 as part of a new media-rights package. That bumped the total number of games played in a season from 256 to 272.

MLB saw a 3.2% increase in attendance last season compared with its last full season before the pandemic, the NBA saw a 1.2% increase, and the NHL saw a 1.1% increase. — EMMANUEL MORGAN

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.