By Joanne Von Furstenburg | Posted on May 26, 2018 10:39 AM
Frozen and Escape to Margaritaville are both launching national tours in the fall of 2019, even though the Broadway shows are performing at opposite ends of the charts.
“Frozen” North American Tour Launches in Fall 2019

“Escape to Margaritaville” to Hit the Road in October 2019

Around the same time, another currently running Broadway musical will launch its national tour. In October 2019, Escape to Margaritaville, the Jimmy Buffett musical, will begin touring performances at Rhode Island’s Providence Performing Arts Center. Before coming to Broadway, the musical went on a mini tour as means of try-out, stopping in La Jolla, Chicago, New Orleans, and Houston before opening at Broadway’s Marquis Theatre in March 2018. Featuring a book by Greg Garcia and Mike O’Malley and directed by Tony winner Christopher Ashley, Escape to Margaritaville is a showcase of the songbook of Jimmy Buffett, the musician and entrepreneur who has a huge fanbase of devotees all over the country. Therefore, in contrast to Frozen, Escape to Margaritaville may actually find greater success on the road than in New York. As for the Broadway production, the show earned negative reviews and received no Tony nominations. On average, the show has been bringing in just 42.31% of its box office potential, as per the figures up until this past week ending May 20, 2018. Nevertheless, there are many Parrotheads, as Jimmy Buffett fans are called, all over the country. There is even a well-known term for the children of Parrotheads: the Parakeets. The term was first coined at a 1985 Jimmy Buffett concert at the Timberwolf Amphitheater in Cincinnati, Ohio. Buffett often attributes his fame to his city, and therefore it will be a prime stop on the tour for Escape to Margaritaville. Buffett also owns two restaurant chains. The first is called Margaritaville, with the original location in Key West, Florida, and now with dozens of locations from Jamaica to Las Vegas to the Cayman Islands to Atlantic City to Minnesota to the Bahamas. Catering to both islanders and middle America, Buffett is a demonstrated success in towns all over the country. The national tour for Escape to Margaritaville is therefore certainly a worthwhile endeavor, even if the Broadway show is not doing as well as the producers would have hoped.