Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, or Broadway, is a theatre genre that consists of the theatrical performances presented in 41 professional theaters, each with 500 or more seats, in the Theater District and Lincoln Center along Broadway, in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Broadway and London's West End together represent the highest commercial level of live theater in the English-speaking world.
While the Broadway thoroughfare is eponymous with the district, it is closely identified with Times Square. Only three theaters are located on Broadway itself: the Broadway Theatre, Palace Theatre, and Winter Garden Theatre. The rest are located on the numbered cross streets, extending from the Nederlander Theatre one block south of Times Square on West 41st Street, north along either side of Broadway to 53rd Street, and Vivian Beaumont Theater, at Lincoln Center on West 65th Street. While exceptions exist, the term "Broadway theatre" is used predominantly to describe venues with seating capacities of at least 500 people. Smaller theaters in New York City are referred to as off-Broadway, regardless of location, while very small venues with fewer than 100 seats are called off-off-Broadway, a term that can also apply to non-commercial, avant-garde, or productions held outside of traditional theater venues.
The Theater District is an internationally prominent tourist attraction in New York City. According to The Broadway League, shows on Broadway sold tickets worth about US$1.54 billion in the 2022–2023 season, repeating the feat the 2023–2024 season. About 12.3 million people attended per season.
Most Broadway shows are musicals. Historian Martin Shefter argues that "Broadway musicals, culminating in the productions of Rodgers and Hammerstein, became enormously influential forms of American popular culture" and contributed to making New York City the cultural capital of the world.
History
Early theatre in New York
New York City's first significant theatre was established in the mid-18th century, around 1750, when actor-managers Walter Murray and Thomas Kean established a resident theatre company at the Theatre on Nassau Street in Lower Manhattan, which held about 280 people. They presented William Shakespeare's plays and ballad operas such as The Beggar's Opera. In 1752, William Hallam sent a company of twelve actors from Britain to the colonies with his brother Lewis as their manager. They established a theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia, and opened with The Merchant of Venice and The Anatomist. The company moved to New York in 1753, performing ballad operas and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida.During the Revolutionary War, theatre was suspended in New York City. But after the war's end, theatre resumed in 1798, when the 2,000-seat Park Theatre was built on Chatham Street on present-day Park Row. A second major theatre, Bowery Theatre, opened in 1826, followed by others.
By the 1840s, P.T. Barnum was operating an entertainment complex in Lower Manhattan. In 1829, at Broadway and Prince Street, Niblo's Garden opened and soon became one of New York's premier nightspots. The 3,000-seat theatre presented all sorts of musical and non-musical entertainments. In 1844, Palmo's Opera House opened and presented opera for only four seasons before bankruptcy led to its rebranding as a venue for plays under the name Burton's Theatre. The Astor Opera House opened in 1847. A riot broke out in 1849 when the lower-class patrons of the Bowery Theatre objected to what they perceived as snobbery by the upper-class audiences at Astor Place: "After the Astor Place Riot of 1849, entertainment in New York City was divided along class lines: opera was chiefly for the upper-middle and upper classes, minstrel shows and melodramas for the middle-class, variety shows in concert saloons for men of the working class and the slumming middle-class."
The plays of William Shakespeare were frequently performed on the Broadway stage during the period, most notably by American actor Edwin Booth who was internationally known for his performance as Hamlet. Booth played the role for a famous 100 consecutive performances at the Winter Garden Theatre in 1865, and would later revive the role at his own Booth's Theatre. Other renowned Shakespeareans who appeared in New York in this era were Henry Irving, Tommaso Salvini, Fanny Davenport, and Charles Fechter.
Birth of the musical and post-Civil War
Theatre in New York moved from Downtown gradually to Midtown Manhattan, beginning around 1850, seeking less expensive real estate. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the area that now comprises the Theater District was owned by a handful of families and comprised a few farms. In 1836, Mayor Cornelius Lawrence opened 42nd Street and invited Manhattanites to "enjoy the pure clean air." Close to 60 years later, theatrical entrepreneur Oscar Hammerstein I built the iconic Victoria Theater on West 42nd Street.Broadway's first "long-run" musical was a 50-performance hit called The Elves in 1857. In 1870, the heart of Broadway was in Union Square, and by the end of the century, many theatres were near Madison Square. Theatres arrived in the Times Square area in the early 1900s, and the Broadway theatres consolidated there after a large number were built around the square in the 1920s and 1930s. New York runs continued to lag far behind those in London, but Laura Keene's "musical burletta" The Seven Sisters shattered previous New York records with a run of 253 performances.
File:Crookfinale.jpg|thumb|upright=1.35|The Black Crook, considered by some historians to be the first musical. Poster for the 1873 revival by The Kiralfy Brothers.
The first theatre piece that conforms to the modern conception of a musical, adding dance and original music that helped to tell the story, is considered to be The Black Crook, which premiered in New York on September 12, 1866. The production was five-and-a-half hours long, but despite its length, it ran for a record-breaking 474 performances. The same year, The Black Domino/Between You, Me and the Post was the first show to call itself a "musical comedy".
Tony Pastor opened the first vaudeville theatre one block east of Union Square in 1881, where Lillian Russell performed. Comedians Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart produced and starred in musicals on Broadway between 1878 and 1890, with book and lyrics by Harrigan and music by his father-in-law David Braham. These musical comedies featured characters and situations taken from the everyday life of New York's lower classes and represented a significant step forward from vaudeville and burlesque, towards a more literate form. They starred high-quality professional singers, instead of the amateurs, often sex workers, who had starred in earlier musical forms.
As transportation improved, poverty in New York diminished, and street lighting made for safer travel at night, the number of potential patrons for the growing number of theatres increased enormously. Plays could run longer and still draw in the audiences, leading to better profits and improved production values. As in England, during the latter half of the century, the theatre began to be cleaned up, with less prostitution hindering the attendance of the theatre by women. Gilbert and Sullivan's family-friendly comic opera hits, beginning with H.M.S. Pinafore in 1878, were imported to New York. They were imitated in New York by American productions such as Reginald Dekoven's Robin Hood and John Philip Sousa's El Capitan, along with operas, ballets, and other British and European hits.
Charles H. Hoyt's show A Trip to Chinatown became Broadway's long-run champion when it surpassed Adonis and its 603 total performances in 1893, holding the stage for 657 performances. Chinatown itself was surpassed by the musical Irene in 1921 as the longest-running Broadway musical, and even earlier, in March 1920, by Lightnin' as the longest-running Broadway show. In 1896, theatre owners Marc Klaw and A. L. Erlanger formed the Theatrical Syndicate, which controlled almost every legitimate theatre in the U.S. for the next sixteen years. However, smaller vaudeville and variety houses proliferated, and Off-Broadway was well established by the end of the nineteenth century.
A Trip to Coontown was the first musical comedy entirely produced and performed by African Americans in a Broadway theatre, followed by the ragtime-tinged Clorindy: The Origin of the Cakewalk, and the highly successful In Dahomey. Hundreds of musical comedies were staged on Broadway in the 1890s and early 1900s made up of songs written in New York's Tin Pan Alley involving composers such as Gus Edwards, John Walter Bratton, and George M. Cohan, 45 Minutes From Broadway, and George Washington Jr. ). Still, New York runs continued to be relatively short, with a few exceptions, compared with London runs, until World War I.
A few very successful British musicals continued to achieve great success in New York, including Florodora in 1900–01.
Early 20th century
In the early years of the twentieth century, translations of popular late-nineteenth century continental operettas were joined by the "Princess Theatre" shows of the 1910s, by writers such as P. G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, and Harry B. Smith. Victor Herbert, whose work included some intimate musical plays with modern settings as well as his string of famous operettas, Babes in Toyland, Mlle. Modiste, The Red Mill, and Naughty Marietta ).Beginning with The Red Mill, Broadway shows installed electric signs outside the theatres. Since colored bulbs burned out too quickly, white lights were used, and Broadway was nicknamed "The Great White Way". In August 1919, the Actors' Equity Association demanded a standard contract for all professional productions. After a strike shut down all the theatres, the producers were forced to agree. By the 1920s, the Shubert Brothers had risen to take over the majority of the theatres from the Erlanger syndicate.
During this time, the play Lightnin by Winchell Smith and Frank Bacon became the first Broadway show to reach 700 performances. From then, it would go on to become the first show to reach 1,000 performances. Lightnin was the longest-running Broadway show until being overtaken in performance totals by Abie's Irish Rose in 1925.