Broadway (theater)

Broadway theatre, commonly known as Broadway, refers to the theatrical performances presented in the 41 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theater District and Lincoln Center along Broadway, in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Along with London's West End theatres, Broadway theatres are widely considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world.

The Theater District is a popular tourist attraction in New York City. According to The Broadway League, for the 2015–2016 season (which ended May 22, 2016), total attendance was 13,317,980 and Broadway shows had US$1,373,253,725 in grosses, with attendance up 1.6%, grosses up 0.6%, and playing weeks up 1.4%.

The great majority of Broadway shows are musicals. Historian Martin Shefter argues, "'Broadway musicals,' culminating in the productions of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, became enormously influential forms of American popular culture" and helped make New York City the cultural capital of the nation.

New York did not have a significant theatre presence until about 1750 when actor-managers Walter Murray and Thomas Kean established a resident theatre 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 theatre 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 in 1798, the year the 2,000-seat Park Theatre was built on Chatham Street (now called Park Row). The Bowery Theatre 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.

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