Great Broadway Musicals

The Broadway is universally acknowledged to be the best place for commercial theater. This is a group of thirty nine theaters in the Theater District in New York City, with a rich heritage of playing host to some of the most critically acclaimed and popular productions of all times. Starting from their early days in the mid eighteenth century, the Broadway has seen glory, fame and popularity, and has been associated with some of the biggest names in the world of theater. It is therefore natural for the Broadway theaters to have achieved a number of great milestones. These milestones are in the form of many important events which happened during the course of time which contributed in the long run to the current status and reputation of the Broadway Theater.

Broadway’s Success Story

The whole Broadway story began in the middle of the eighteenth century, before which New York had no significant place where the play could be staged for the masses. Walter Murray and Thomas Kean, two managers, took it upon themselves to provide such a platform, and started a theater company, staging plays by Shakespeare and other popular playwrights. They traveled to New York, where in 1798; the building of the Park Theater signaled the start of an era. Soon, new theaters sprang up around the neighbourhood, and the process of building a theater community was initiated. People expressed great enthusiasm and came in hordes to watch the productions.

Lydia Thompson was the first of many great names to grace the Broadway theaters, with her troupe performing adaptations of contemporary English plays. The first of the Broadway musicals, The Black Crook, was staged in the 1860’s, which also saw the beginning of Laura Keene’s musical, which ran for a stupendous number of days and drew great crowds. With the opening of the very first Vaudeville Theater by Tony Pastor, the era of the great Broadway musicals was ushered in, and the plays were a great hit among the theater going crowd, often running for the better part of a year to a full house. More and more stories were adapted for the stage, and the concept of comic opera gained popularity among the masses.

In the 1890’s, a number of great things happened. The greatest of them was the advent of A Trip To Chinatown; the Charles Hoyt production, which was the first ever to be produced entirely by visiting African-American theater professionals. A Trip To Chinatown was the greatest Broadway success of the time, running to full houses for a total of 657 consecutive performances. It was indeed a record at that time, although later it was considered to be an average performance, as plays like My Fair Lady, Fiddler On The Roof and Les Miserables went on to have thousands of screenings.

The true spectacle of the roadway theaters was The Phantom Of The Opera, a truly phenomenal piece of work which holds the record for the highest number of performances till date, a whopping 8747 and still counting. These were the hits that brought Broadway fame and glory, and still continue to do so amidst a growing group of theater lovers.

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