California Musical Theatre will drastically reduce the number of performances it schedules for next season's Broadway Sacramento series of professional touring musicals.

In a letter mailed Monday to season subscribers, Executive Producer Richard Lewis said economic realities and continuing low attendance have forced the change.

"The theater's empty," Lewis said Tuesday. "We're just going to have to have fewer performances of some really great shows."

Instead of the current two-week, 16-performance schedule, most productions will be presented for one week only, with eight performances.

Five shows will get one-week engagements and a sixth show, the phenomenally popular "Wicked," will have an extended four-week run.

The complete season will be announced on April 11.

Two shows remain in the current Broadway Sacramento series: "Young Frankenstein" (April 13-24) and "Mary Poppins" (June 2-19).

Attendance has declined steadily over the past two seasons, according to box office figures.

In the 2008-2009 season, the average weekly attendance was 13,695 or 75.8 percent of capacity. Factoring out the five-week run of the popular Disney franchise "The Lion King," that season's numbers drop to 11,746 or 69.4 percent of capacity, on average.

For the 2009-2010 season, the weekly average was 11,041 or 58.7 percent. For the current season – through the recent "9 to 5" production – attendance is averaging 10,190 or 53.5 percent of capacity.

Lewis said that last year, California Musical Theatre considered making the change for this season.

"But then we looked at the season and it was so strong with so many terrific pieces of work, including the Northern California premiere of 'Mary Poppins,' (June 2-19) we thought things would turn."

In addition to attendance, subscriber numbers for the Broadway Sacramento series have steadily dropped during the past three years. In 2007-2008 they were at 17,642; in 2008-2009 they were 14,553; in 2009-2010, they were 12,786; and there are 11,832 subscribers in the current season.

"We hoped to get to back to 13,500 in subscribers, maybe 14,000," Lewis said. "If we'd done that, I don't think we'd going back to one week, but we didn't get there."

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

Call The Bee's Marcus Crowder, (916) 321-1120.

• Read more articles by Marcus Crowder