Nicknamed ‘The Great White Way’ after electrical lighting was installed in 1880, New York City’s theatre district is technically a 12-block stretch of Broadway in midtown Manhattan that runs from 41st to 53rd Street. It’s not geography that defines the legacy of this treasured American institution, of course. No, Broadway is Ethel Merman belting out There’s No Business Like Show Business in Annie Get Your Gun (1946) . It’s Zero Mostel — who’d go on to star in Mel Brooks’s 1967 film The Producers that would become a 2001 Broadway smash with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick — singing If I Were a Rich Man in Fiddler on the Roof (1964) . And most recently it’s the diverse cast of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s ground-breaking and enormously popular Hamilton: An American Musical (2015) rapping the story of Alexander Hamilton’s rise from poverty to power. Broadway’s origins extend back to the mid-18th century, when the nascent metropolis hadn’t yet grown past what is now lower Manhattan. A theater company was established in 1732 on Nassau Street that staged Shakespearian plays and ‘ballad operas’ — a precursor to the development of popular musicals — for audiences that began to number in the hundreds. Performances were halted temporarily during the Revolutionary War, but live theatre in NYC took a great leap forward with the opening of the 2,000-seat Park Theater in 1798. As New York City grew, so did the need for larger performance spaces. The Bowery Theater opened in 1826, its 3,500 seats making it the largest theater venue in North America. A first wave of ragtag musical performances competed with traditional Shakespeare, creating a thriving scene that took advantage of more affordable midtown real estate prices and relocated to a district that stretched from Madison Square to Union Square. Flush with cash and an audience hungry for new forms of entertainment, a new type of longer-running, song-based shows captured the public’s imagination. Which begs the question: What was the first Broadway musical? At least three stake a claim. The Elves (1857) with 50 performances is widely considered Broadway’s first long-run musical. A ‘musical burletta’ (short comic opera incorporating burlesque) called The Seven Sisters (1860) ran for 253 consecutive performances, but The Black Crook (1866) most resembled the modern musical and ran for 474 shows at a time when a 20-performance run was considered respectable.
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