Broadway is a group of 40 professional theatres in the Theatre District and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan, New York City. It is not just for theatre that Broadway is famous for, its legacy attracts millions of people whether they are theatre enthusiasts or not.

Here is a little bit of Broadway history.

It was only in the year 1750 that New York got its own Theaters. It happened when Walter Murray and Thomas Kean came up with a resident theatre company at the Theatre on Nassau Street. It was just the beginning.  It was a company from Britain that next entered the scene. The theatre was established by Lewis Hallam in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1752. By the summer of 1753 they moved to New York. Though the Revolutionary War put a pause on the theatre scene for a while, but it was back with a bang in 1798.

The Park Theater that could seat 2000 people was built on Chatham Street which became the Park Row.  It was followed by the Bowery Theatre in 1826. Many more theatres came up as the 1830’s was the age of the Blackface minstrel shows.  In 1829, Niblo’s Garden at Broadway and Prince Street- a 3,000-seat theatre- which presented musical and non musical entertainments became the New York’s most happening night place. By the 1940’s an entertainment complex under P.T. Barnum came up in lower Manhattan.

The Broadway history took a new turn with the opening of the Astor Place Theatre in 1847. In 1849 the Astor Place Riot took place regarding the upper class audience at Astor Place.  There after entertainment in New York was divided. The upper and upper middle classes began going for operas, the minstrel shows, melodrama entertained the middle class and the men of the working class, and the lower middle class had to content themselves with variety shows in concert saloons. The plays of William Shakespeare were popular in Broadway at the time and the actor Edwin Booth gave some scintillating performances on stage at the Winter Garden Theatre in 1865. He later started Booth’s Theatre also.

The Broadway was rejuvenated in the year 1868 with Lyndia Thomson and her theatrical troupe bringing English burlesques to the American soil. Theatre began to move to midtown New York in the 1870’s. Union Square and Madison square became the new areas. In the early 1900’s Broadway theatres reached Times Square also.

The arrival of the Musical

It was in 1857 that The Elves came to Broadway. It was the first “long- run” musical, which went up to 50 performances. Then Laura Keene’s “musical burletta” Seven Sisters (1860) also established the popular entertainment as musicals.

The modern version of the musical with dance and original music began with The Black Crook, which premiered in New York on September 12, 1866. Though it lasted five and a half hours it ran for a record 474 performances.

Then it was time for the musical comedies, The Black Domino/Between You, Me and the Post, being the first. Tony Pastor opened the first vaudeville theatre in Union Square in 1881. Broadway became the scene for comedians like Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart between 1878 and 1885.

Better times

As New York grew, so did its entertainment. Theatres received more patrons and they also became women friendly.  Many famous comic operas reached Broadway. Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore(1878), Reginald Dekoven’s Robin Hood (1891) and John Philip Sousa’s El Capitan (1896) Charles Hoyt’s A Trip to Chinatown (1891)  and Irene in 1919 were some of the greatest Broadway shows. .

Hundreds of musical comedies were staged on Broadway in the 1890s and early 1900s In the early years of the 20th century, translations of popular late-19th century continental operettas  were joined by the “Princess Theatre” shows of the 1910s by writers such as P. G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton and Harry B. Smith. Victor Herbert.

The popularity of Broadway is what led to the establishment of Tony Awards in 1947.

If you are a Broadway musical fan, buy tickets to famous Broadway musicals such as Shrek, Come Fly Away, Riverdance, Wicked, Spamalot, Rock of Ages, Mamma Mia, Billy Elliot, Addams Family, Million Dollar Quartet, LA CAGE AUX FOLLES, and Memphis today!