JUST like cooking a culinary masterpiece, making a hit Broadway show requires the right ingredients. The more the chef knows about the measurements and recipe, the more likely it is that a restaurant can fill its seats with new customers. To give our readers a taste of what it’s like to be a Broadway chef, we have built an interactive graphic to demonstrate how a producer’s choices can affect a show’s earnings in its first nine months.

On the whole musicals tend to be more lucrative than plays, especially if they are based on Disney movies. Using data from the Ulmer Scale, an index which rates Hollywood actors on their “bankability”, we found that having a big movie star boosted income tremendously. “Lucky Guy”, for instance, starred Tom Hanks and was sold out for all but one week during its four-month run.

Factors outside the producer’s control also affect revenues. We found that productions which eventually win major Tony awards, theatre’s equivalent of the Oscars, performed better in their first year, though newspaper reviews seemed to matter less.

Sales can be plotted on both a cumulative and a weekly basis. Switching to the latter reveals the strong impact of seasonality: shows tend to do better around Christmas and New Year. Even though its turnover has been artificially suppressed by its producers’ reluctance to raise ticket prices too sharply, “Hamilton” already has a strong claim as the most successful Broadway show of all time, and is on pace to shatter all existing records. Nonetheless, our model suggests that in theory, it should be possible to design an even higher-grossing show. See if you can build one using our interactive.

A fuller explanation of our methodology can be found here.