Broadway
Broadway theater pertains to the theatrical performances presented in one of the 39 large professional theaters with 500 seats or more located in the Theatre District, New York (plus one theatre in Lincoln Center) in Manhattan, New York City.
Along with London's West End theatre, Broadway theatre is usually considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world.
The Broadway theatre district is a popular tourist attraction in New York City. According to The Broadway League, Broadway shows sold approximately $937 million worth of tickets in the 2007-08 season.
Brief history
New York (and therefore, the United States of America) did not have a significant theatre presence until about 1750, when actor-managers Walter Murray and Thomas Kean established a resident theater company at the Theatre on Nassau Street, which held about 280 people.
They presented Shakespeare 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 theater in Williamsburg, Virginia and opened with The Merchant of Venice and The Anatomist.
The company moved to New York in the summer of 1753, performing ballad operas and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida.
The Revolutionary War suspended theatre in New York, but thereafter theatre resumed, and in 1798, the 2,000-seat Park Theatre was built on Chatham Street (now called Park Row).
The Bowery Theater opened in 1826, followed by others. Blackface minstrel shows, a distinctly American form of entertainment, became popular in the 1830s, and
especially so with the arrival of the Virginia Minstrels in the 1840s.
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 premiere nightspots. The 3,000-seat theater presented all sorts of musical and non-musical entertainments.
The Astor Place Theatre opened in 1847.
Schedule of shows
Although there are now more exceptions than there once were, generally shows with open-ended runs operate on the same schedule, with evening performances Tuesday through Saturday with an 8 p.m. "curtain" and afternoon "matinée" performances on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday; typically at 2 p.m. on Wednesdays and Saturdays and 3 p.m. on Sundays, making a standard eight performance week.
On this schedule, shows do not play on Monday, and the shows and theatres are said to be "dark" on that day. Actors and crew in these shows tend to regard Sunday evening through Tuesday evening as their "weekend". The Tony Award presentation ceremony is usually held on a Sunday evening in June to fit into this schedule.
In recent years, many shows have moved their Tuesday show time an hour earlier to 7 p.m.
The rationale for the move was that fewer tourists took in shows midweek, so the Tuesday crowd in particular depends on local audience members.
The earlier curtain therefore allows suburban patrons time after a show to get home by a reasonable hour.
Some shows, especially those produced by Disney, change their performance schedules fairly frequently, depending on the season, in order to maximize access to their targeted audience.
Participants
Both musicals and stage plays on Broadway often rely on casting well-known performers in leading roles to draw larger audiences or bring in new audience members to the theatre.
Actors from movies and television are frequently cast for the revivals of Broadway shows or are used to replace actors leaving a cast.
There are still, however, performers who are primarily stage actors, spending most of their time "on the boards", and appearing in television and in screen roles only secondarily.
In the past, stage actors had a somewhat superior attitude towards other kinds of live performances, such as vaudeville and burlesque, which were felt to be tawdry, commercial and lowbrow —they considered their own craft to be a higher and more artistic calling.
Almost all of the people involved with a Broadway show at every level are represented by unions or other protective, professional or trade organization.
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