42nd Street (musical)

42nd Street
Original Broadway Cast Recording
Music	Harry Warren
Lyrics	Al Dubin
Book	Michael Stewart Mark Bramble
Basis	1932 novel by Bradford Ropes 1933 film screenplay by Rian James James Seymour Whitney Bolton
Premiere	25 August 1980 Winter Garden Theatre
Productions	1980 Broadway 1984 West End 1985 San Francisco 1996 South Korea 2001 Broadway revival 2007 UK Tour 2007–08 Asian Tour 2012 UK Tour 2015–16 US Tour 2017 West End revival 2016-17 Paris
Awards	Tony Award for Best Musical Olivier Award for Best Musical Evening Standard for Best Musical Tony Award for Best Revival Drama Desk Outstanding Revival

42nd Street is an American musical with a book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble, lyrics by Al Dubin, and music by Harry Warren. The 1980 Broadway production, produced by David Merrick, directed by an ailing Gower Champion and orchestrated by Philip J. Lang, won the Tony Award for Best Musical and became a long-running hit. The show was produced in London in 1984 (winning the Olivier Award for Best Musical) and its 2001 Broadway revival won the Tony for Best Revival.

Based on the novel by Bradford Ropes and the subsequent 1933 Hollywood film adaptation, the show focuses on the efforts of famed dictatorial Great White Way director Julian Marsh to mount a successful stage production of a musical extravaganza at the height of the Great Depression.

Producer David Merrick "took a huge gamble with his $3 million production based on the 1933 Warner Brothers film musical", as "only one other show had made the transfer from original movie musical to the stage -- 'Gigi,' a flop in 1974." He felt audiences once again were ready to embrace the nostalgia craze started by the successful revivals of No, No, Nanette, Irene, and his own Very Good Eddie several years earlier, and augmented the familiar songs from the film's soundtrack with a liberal dose of popular tunes from the Dubin-Warren catalogue. According to theater historian John Kenrick, "When the curtain slowly rose to reveal forty pairs of tap-dancing feet, the star-studded opening night audience at the Winter Garden cheered...Champion followed this number with a series of tap-infused extravaganzas larger and more polished than anything Broadway really had in the 1930s."