Boxoffice Insider: Dionne – An Enduring Legend & A Venue Favorite Through The Years

Prominent in the archives are venues that have hosted the six-time Grammy-winning Warwick for multiple performances over the years, both for solo headlining dates and appearances at numerous multiple-artist engagements. 

Among those venues, the Theatre at Westbury, originally named Westbury Music Fair, on New York’s Long Island appears most often in the singer’s box office history. Eight separate engagements, including two years when she played two shows, were reported at the 2,870-seat theater between 1988 and 2005. The first was a July 26, 1988 sold-out show with 2,862 fans in the audience, which remains her best-attended solo performance at the venue. With a gross totaling $53,533 (about $120,000 today), the concert occurred during a period of renaissance in Warwick’s career fueled by two successful singles, the Grammy-winning smash “That’s What Friends Are For,” a collaboration with Elton John, Gladys Knight and Stevie Wonder that topped charts around the world in 1986, and “Love Power,” a 1987 duet with Jeffrey Osborne.

The most performances Warwick recorded at one venue, though, was 16, each part of the several multiple-show stints she played at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall in 1985, 1987, 1989 and 1992.

The Radio City engagements in three of those years were co-headlining events with Johnny Mathis, but the 1987 concerts on Sept. 24, 25 and 26 were a double bill starring Warwick and Burt Bacharach, who penned many of her iconic hits, including “I Say A Little Prayer” and “Walk On By.” The concerts, part of a tour that year with both artists, featured much of the music they created together in the ‘60s along with newer material. The three New York performances drew 16,503 attendees during the run for a gross that reached $448,595 (more than $1 million in 2021 dollars). Total tickets sold for all four engagements at Radio City Music Hall reached 85,363 for an overall gross of $2,674,865 (some $6 million now).

The 1987 Warwick and Bacharach co-headlining tour also played Filene Center at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Va. on July 22, and moved 7,101 tickets. On the next night, 5,212 fans attended the bill’s show at Garden State (now PNC Bank) Arts Center in Holmdel, N.J. Also reported was a two-show stand on July 30-31 at Concord (Calif.) Pavilion with an attendance of 7,151. Later that year, on Oct. 20-21, Warwick and Bacharach performed two nights at Riverside Theatre in Milwaukee with 3,796 seats sold.

Mathis also shared the stage with Warwick at many venues during the ‘80s and ‘90s, among them the Chicago Theatre, which staged 10 performances with the co-headliners in fall 1986. The concerts drew 32,046 fans for a box office take of $742,059 (now $1.8 million).

In January 1986, Warwick and Mathis joined forces for seven performances at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre, selling 30,566 tickets for a gross valued at $1.3 million today.

That Atlanta theater reported 10 total concerts over the years for Warwick including a more recent 2019 performance titled “A Night of Class” which also featured Peabo Bryson and Deniece Williams on the bill. Presented by We Are Live Entertainment, the event on Aug. 23, 2019 grossed $263,560 from 2,594 total tickets. Across the 10 Fox Theatre concerts in the archives, Warwick averaged 3,886 tickets per show for a gross average of $86,697.

The 1,800-seat Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts in Southern California reported 12 Warwick appearances there beginning with a show in December 1995. In 1999, she joined the lineup of the venue’s annual “The Colors of Christmas” production, which drew 6,043 holiday attendees to four shows. Her most recent concert in Cerritos occurred 20 years later, on Sept. 28, 2019. The show had a ticket count of 1,305 and came on the heels of her Las Vegas residency earlier that year at the Jubilee Theater at Bally’s.