Vaudeville more profitable than The Book of Mormon

"One circuit [of vaudeville theatres] will speak for all. It has a theatre in New York, one in Philadelphia, one in Boston, and one in Providence, and they give no Sunday performances; and yet these four theatres entertain over 5,000,000 people every year, give employment to 350 attaches and to 3,500 actors. Four thousand people pass in and out of each one of these theatres daily. Ten thousand dollars are distributed each week in salaries to the actors and $3,500 to the attaches. Take one theatre for example, the house in Boston. It is open the year round and it costs $7,000 a week to keep it open, while its patrons will average 25,000 every week. On a holiday it will play to from ten to twelve thousand people. How is it possible?" - Edwin Milton Royle (1862-1940) from The Vaudeville Theatre

Essentially the Boston house was paying the staff and cast almost double what the show costs, making the weekly profits of the show at least three times the cost. To put this into perspective...The Book of Mormon costs just over $600,000 a week to produce and rack up a profit of 1.2 million/wk (excluding royalties which diminish this) so their profit is roughly double.