Broadway theatre: Difference between revisions
Type of theatre in New York City
Broadway theatre,[nb 1] or Broadway, are the theatrical performances presented in the 41 professional theatres, each with 500 or more seats, located in the Theater District and the Lincoln Center along Broadway, in Midtown Manhattan, New York City.[1][2] Broadway and London‘s West End together represent the highest commercial level of live theater in the English-speaking world.[3]
While the thoroughfare is eponymous with the district and its collection of 41 theaters, and it is closely identified with Times Square, only three of the theaters are located on Broadway itself, namely the Broadway Theatre, the Palace Theatre, and the 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, as well as the Vivian Beaumont Theater, at Lincoln Center on West 65th Street. While exceptions exist, the term “Broadway theatre” is generally reserved for venues with a seating capacity of at least 500 people. Smaller theaters in New York 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 or avant-garde theater, or productions held outside of traditional theater venues.[4]
The Theater District is an internationally prominent tourist attraction in New York City. According to The Broadway League, for the 2018–19 season total attendance was 14,768,254. Broadway shows had $1,829,312,140 in grosses, with attendance up 9.5%, grosses up 10.3%, and playing weeks up 9.3%.[5] The Museum of Broadway on West 45th Street, opened to the public in November 2022, became the first museum to document the history and experience of Broadway theatre and its profound influence upon shaping Midtown Manhattan and Times Square.
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.”[6]
History[edit]
Early theatre in New York[edit]
New York’s first significant theatre presence arose about 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 Shakespeare plays and ballad operas such as The Beggar’s Opera.[7] 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. The Revolutionary War suspended theatre in New York, but thereafter theatre resumed in 1798, the year the 2,000-seat Park Theatre was built on Chatham Street (now called Park Row).[7] The Bowery Theatre opened in 1826,[8] 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.”[9]
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 (with the run ending just a few months before Booth’s brother John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln), and would later revive the role at his own Booth’s Theatre (which was managed for a time by his brother Junius Brutus Booth, Jr.). Other renowned Shakespeareans who appeared in New York in this era were Henry Irving,…