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: NOW PLAYING :: WORLD ALMANAC OF RECORDS :: Broadway musicals Writer: Robert Cashill The Broadway musical is one of America’s most popular and enduring art forms. With roots that stretch back to 19th century vaudeville, the musical has expanded from the extravagant song-and-dance revues of producer Florenz Ziegfeld. Backed by books that provide a structure for the music and choreography, the content of a musical can encompass any number of serious subjects—with, of course, lots of comedy and frivolity to keep the 39 theaters that constitute today’s Broadway humming along. MILESTONES 1904—“Times Square” is born when The New York Times opens its headquarters at the once-dangerous intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue. The 5,200-seat Hippodrome, the world’s largest theater, also opens, absorbing all of Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets. Circus, ballet, and avant-garde acts are featured. Developer and producer Oscar Hammerstein switches the programming at his Victoria, opened in 1899, from legitimate theater to vaudeville to keep up with audience demand for musical comedy along “The Great White Way,” as Broadway is called for its bright electrical illumination. Today, only five Broadway theaters, the Cadillac Winter Garden, the Marquis, the Palace, Circle in the Square, and of course the Broadway have actual Broadway addresses. 1907—Producer Florenz Ziegfeld launches the first of his famous Follies show, bursting with musical comedy (and lots of beautiful women adorned in peacock feathers and other tastefully revealing costumes) in July 1907. Subsequent editions spotlight famous performers like Fanny Brice (the subject of the 1964 musical Funny Girl, which propels Barbra Streisand to stardom), Eddie Cantor, and W.C. Fields. 1927—A record 264 plays and musicals open in the 1927-1928 Broadway season. Musical revues and operettas predominate, with contributions from stage legends like Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, and Oscar Hammerstein’s grandson, Oscar Hammerstein II. Hammerstein and composer Jerome Kern break new ground in musical theater by adapting Edna Ferber’s book Show Boat, with its novelistic plot, mixture of white and black characters, and its serious themes, for the stage. It opens at the Ziegfeld on Dec. 27 and with popular standards like “Ol’ Man River” runs a record 572 performances. 1943—The Great Depression, which wipes out Florenz Ziegfeld’s $3 million fortune, and the increasing popularity of movies over theater discourage further experiments in the musical form like Show Boat. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! , which begins a five-year run on March 31, revives the genre and officially inaugurates the era of narrative storylines in musical theater. The show runs a record-breaking 2,212 performances and, boosted by the title song (a last-minute addition to the score), spawns the first cast album, available as a package of six 78rpm records. 1949—Cole Porter’s musical comedy Kiss Me, Kate wins the first Tony Award for Best Musical, and four others besides. [The Tonys, founded two years earlier, are named after former American Theatre Wing chairman Antoinette Perry.] The show is based on the feuding that occurred between theater legends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne during a Broadway production of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. 1955—From the big stage to the small screen. NBC broadcasts a live production of director Jerome Robbins’ hit musical of Peter Pan, starring Mary Martin, which had been playing at the Winter Garden. The broadcast attracts 65 million viewers and wins an Emmy, and the new medium is used more extensively to promote the older one. 1956—Eager to secure the music rights, Columbia Records bankrolls the $400,000 needed to bring My Fair Lady, with movie star Rex Harrison and an unknown Julie Andrews, to the Mark Hellinger on March 15, 1956. Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, who brought George Bernard Shaw’s 1914 play Pygmalion to musical life with composer Frederick Loewe, reports that the investment was a wise one: The show (courtesy of its six-year Broadway run, its four years on London’s West End, its many international productions, and its $5 million sale to the movies) earns a phenomenal $800 million for the company and its creators. 1961—The film version of West Side Story is the first adaptation of a Broadway musical to win the Best Picture Oscar, and with nine other Oscar wins (a then-record) and a $44 million domestic boxoffice gross help make a legend of the ground-breaking but downbeat show, which ran at the Winter Garden and the Broadway from 1957-1959. Films of My Fair Lady (1964), The Sound of Music (1965), Oliver! (1968), and Chicago (2002) follow in its golden footsteps. [In 1973, Lerner and Loewe turn their original film musical, Gigi, the best picture of 1958, into a Broadway show, but it flops.] 1964—Fiddler on the Roof opens at the Imperial on Sept. 22, 1964, and runs a then-record 3,242 performances (the first musical to exceed the 3,000 mark) over the next eight years. The achievement is marked with a special Tony Award in 1972. [Two shows launched in the Seventies, a revival of the bawdy revue Oh, Calcutta! and the juggernaut A Chorus Line, eventually surpass it.] Fed up with the demands of the form, perfectionist director Jerome Robbins never launches another original musical. 1972—Named after its architect, the Uris Theatre, Broadway’s largest with 1,933 seats, opens on West 51st St. with a musical flop, Via Galactica. The theater is renamed the George Gershwin during the 1983 Tonys telecast and from 2003 has housed the hit Wicked. 1975—With no sets, costumes, or stars, Michael Bennett’s A Chorus Line, a tale of Broadway “gypsies” trying out for a new musical, proves itself “One Singular Sensation” upon its July 25 opening and runs an astonishing 15 years, almost doubling Fiddler’s run with 6,137 total performances. 1982—The British are coming…and staying. English producer Cameron Mackintosh and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, joined by veteran Broadway producer Harold Prince, bring the feline poems of T.S. Eliot to tuneful life with Cats, a hit on London’s West End and a purr-fect family-friendly antidote to the darker musicals of Stephen Sondheim at home. Its unprecedented 18-year run at the Winter Garden ends with 7,485 performances, though an even more potent Webber-Mackintosh-Prince collaboration, The Phantom of the Opera, is likely to kick it out of the sandbox next year. Another Mackintosh megahit, Les Miserables, is secure in the third top-running slot. 1991—British fever peaks with Mackintosh’s production of Miss Saigon, which opens on April 11, and sets an unbeaten record for largest pre-opening advance sales, $36 million. [It’s also the first musical to charge $100 per ticket.] Critics dismiss the circus-like production values of the Brit hits; the new one is dominated by a near full-size helicopter prop. 1997—With its screen to stage translation of Beauty and the Beast (1994- ) a hit, the Walt Disney Company births a second Broadway blockbuster with iconoclastic director Julie Taymor’s puppet-filled adaptation of The Lion King (1997- ), which pulses to an African beat and delights critics and audiences, winning the Best Musical Tony. Its estimated cost is a record $20 million. SUPERLATIVES GETTING TO KNOW YUL. Yul Brynner played his part in the “Golden Age of Musicals” by starring as the King of Siam in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I (1951-1954), for which he won a Tony in 1952 and, in 1956, an Oscar for the film version. Brynner revived the show on Broadway two more times, in 1977 and 1985, and toured relentlessly, eventually performing the role a kingly 4,525 times. For this singular achievement he won a special Tony award in 1985, a few months before his death. THE MUSIC OF THE NIGHT. There are blockbuster entertainments, like the Star Wars movie trilogy. And then there is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, which is in a galaxy all its own. Launched on London’s West End in 1986, and imported to Broadway in 1988, the show is set to become the longest-running Broadway musical in 2006. But that’s not the half of it. An estimated 58 million people, in 20 countries and 110 cities, have seen the masked man in more than 65,000 performances (9.4 million viewers at Broadway’s Majestic alone), and have paid $3 billion to see him work his seductive magic—making Phantom the most popular entertainment property, in any medium, of the entire 20th century. FACTOIDS: WHEN YOU GOT IT, FLAUNT IT. Adapted from Mel Brooks’ 1968 comedy, a Best Original Screenplay winner at the Academy Awards, the musicalization of The Producers takes Broadway by storm on its opening night, April 19, 2001. It receives a record 15 Tony nominations and sets another record by winning 12, including Best Musical. BROADWAY’S PRINCE. Producer-director Harold Prince has won 20 Tony Awards, more than anyone else. Wins for the adult-themed and psychologically complex Company (1970-1972), Follies (1971-1972), A Little Night Music (1973-1974), and Sweeney Todd (1979-1980) were for his work on Stephen Sondheim shows, the record-holder for most wins by a composer, with eight Tonys. [Critics love their shows but none has run more than 1,000 performances, the benchmark of a big Broadway hit.] Prince also co-produced the Tony Award-winning best musicals The Pajama Game (1954-1956) and Damn Yankees (1955-1957), choreographed by the Tonys’ most lauded danceman, Bob Fosse, who won eight trophies for his sexy and streetwise moves. TONY’S WOMEN: With four trophies apiece, Angela Lansbury, Gwen Verdon, and Mary Martin are in a three-way tie for most Tony wins by a musical theater actress. SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT BROADWAY ROCKS. Billed as “the American Tribal Love Rock Musical,” the New York East Village hippies of Hair “let the sun shine in” on rock-influenced scores when it opened at the Biltmore on April 29, 1968. Its composer, Galt McDermot, and lyricists Gerome Ragni and James Rado receive Tony Award nominations but would have no other hits besides the show, which ran 1,750 performances and closed in 1972. Still, its vibe is reflected in subsequent triumphs like the 50’s-styled Grease (1972-1980) and the Tony-winning Best Musical Rent (1996- ), whose 35-year-old writer and composer, Jonathan Larson, died before its Broadway opening. The new wave of rock musicals, like Mamma Mia! (imported from London’s West End in 2001) and Twyla Tharp’s dance piece Movin’ Out (2002- ), use the greatest hits of acts like ABBA and Billy Joel. FAMOUS FLOPS. A musical can be about almost anything, but there are limits to what critics and audiences will accept. The musical dud that avid theatergoers most treasure is Carrie, which ran five performances in May 1988. Based on Stephen King’s 1974 book and subsequent 1976 film about a telekinetic teen, the gore-filled musical, with numbers like “Out for Blood” and “The Destruction,” played the Virginia, whose entire interior was painted pitch-black for additional spooky atmosphere. “There’s Never Been a Musical Like Her,” the ads promised, and Carrie went on to break a record—most investment lost on a musical, $8 million. Her “achievement” held until 2003, when another monster musical, Dance of the Vampires (with Phantom star Michael Crawford as a singing bloodsucker) was staked in the heart to the tune of $12 million squandered at the Minskoff.