Broadway

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Broadway

If Hollywood is synonymous with the cinema, Broadway has come to signify the American theater. From its humble beginnings in downtown New York City in the early nineteenth century, to its heyday as the Great White Way in the mid-twentieth century, to its status as one of America's chief tourist attractions at the end of the twentieth century, Broadway has lured both aspiring actors and starstruck theatergoers for well over a century, becoming, in the process, one of America's chief contributions to global culture. As the home of the American musical theater and the breeding ground for both popular and cutting-edge drama, Broadway has helped to nurture America's performing arts, even as it has enticed the greatest stars of England and Europe to its stages. In a nation that struggled long and hard to define itself and its artistic community as separate from yet equal to Europe, Broadway stands as one of America's greatest success stories.

As early as 1826, New York City had begun making a name for itself as the hub of the nascent American theater. That year, the Park Theatre featured the debut of the first two American-born actors who would go on to achieve fame and fortune in the theater—Edwin Forrest and James H. Hackett. Later that same year, the 3,000-seat Bowery Theatre opened; it was the first playhouse to have both a press agent and glass-shaded gas-jet lighting. The grand new venue would soon become legendary for the frequently rowdy working-class theatergoers it would attract. Over the next 20 years, Americans flocked to the New York theater district in increasing numbers, and in 1849, when the celebrated British actor William Macready brought his Macbeth to the Astor Place Opera House, Edwin Forrest supporters turned out en masse to protest the British star. On May 10th, a riot of over 1,000 resulted in the death of 22 people.

During the mid-nineteenth century, the biggest stars of the American theater were Fanny Kemble and Edwin Booth. Booth's 100 performances of Hamlet at the Winter Garden would stand as a record for the Shakespearean tragedy until John Barrymore's 1923 production. In addition to European classics, among the most popular of American plays was Uncle Tom's Cabin, which, in its first production, ran for 325 performances. But while both dramas and melodramas drew steady audiences, a new kind of revue called vaudeville, featuring burlesques and other musical entertainment, was beginning to come into fashion at the Olympic Theatre.

By 1880, Broadway had become the generic term for American theater. Shows would premiere in the New York theater district, which was then centered downtown at Union Square and 14th Street. From New York, road companies would then travel to other cities and towns with Broadway's hit shows. That year, the world's most famous actress, France's Sarah Bernhardt, would make her American debut at the Booth Theatre. Over the remaining 20 years of the nineteenth century, many of the great English and European actors and actresses such as Lillie Langtree, Henry Irving, and Eleanora Duse, would come to Broadway before making triumphal national tours. Among the most popular American stars of this period were Edwin Booth and his acting partner, Lawrence Barrett; James O'Neill, father of playwright Eugene O'Neill; and Richard Mansfield.

One of Broadway's most successful playwright-cum-impresarios of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was David Belasco, who made his Broadway debut in 1880 with Hearts of Oak, a play that touted stage realism to the degree that the audience could smell the food being served in a dinner scene. European realists such as Henrik Ibsen were also well received in America. But Broadway devoted equal, if not more time, to the growing desire for "family entertainment," and vaudeville became all the rage.

In 1893, the American Theatre opened on 42nd Street, an area that had previously been residential. In ensuing years, the theater district would gradually inch its way uptown to Times Square. By the end of the century, most theaters were located between 20th and 40th Streets, and vaudeville had firmly established itself as the most popular form of family entertainment in America. In just 75 years, the American theater had set down such deep roots that acting schools had begun to open around the country; organizations for the welfare of aging theatrical professionals were formed; and the first periodical devoted exclusively to the stage, Theatre Magazine, was founded.

With the start of the twentieth century came the beginnings of the modern American theater. In 1900, three brothers from Syracuse, New York—Sam, Lee, and J.J. Shubert—arrived in New York City, where they quickly made their presence felt. They not only leased the Herald Square Theatre, but they put Broadway star Richard Mansfield under contract and hired booking agent Abe Erlanger. The Shuberts were following the lead of other producers and booking agents, such as the Theatre Syndicate and the United Booking Office, who had begun the theatrical monopolies that soon came to rule Broadway—and the nation. When the Shuberts brought Sarah Bernhardt to the United States for her farewell tour in 1905, the Syndicate blocked her appearance in legitimate theaters throughout the United States. As a publicity ploy, the Shuberts erected a circus tent in New York City, in which the great star was forced to appear, garnering nationwide publicity, and $1 million in profits. It was during this contentious period that actors began to realize that they needed to form an organization that would guarantee their rights, and in 1912, Actors Equity was founded.

Throughout the beginning of the century, feuds between competing producers, impresarios, theater circuits, and booking companies dominated Broadway, with such famous names as William Morris, Martin Beck, William Hammerstein, and the Orpheum Circuit all getting into the fray. But amidst all the chaos, the American theater continued to grow in both quality and popularity, as new stars seemed to be born almost every day. One of the most distinguished names on turn-of-the-century Broadway was that of the Barrymore family. The three children of actor Maurice Barrymore—sons Lionel and John and daughter Ethel—took their first Broadway bows during this period, rising to dazzling heights during their heyday.

Florenz Ziegfeld, another of the leading lights of Broadway, had made his debut as a producer in 1896. His Follies of 1907 was the first of the annual music, dance, and comic extravaganzas that would come to bear his name after 1911. Other producers soon followed suit with similar revues featuring comic sketches and songs. Among the most popular of these were the Shuberts' Passing Shows, George White's Scandals, and Irving Berlin's Music Box Revues. Many composers who would go on to great heights found their starts with these revues, including Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and George Gershwin. But even more significantly, these revues catapulted singers and comedians to a new kind of national stardom. Among the household names featured in these reviews were Fanny Brice, Lillian Lorraine, Marilyn Miller, Bert Williams, Ed Wynn, Will Rogers, and Al Jolson.

By the 1910s, music had become an increasingly significant force on Broadway, and a slew of new young composers had begun to make their marks—including Cole Porter and George M. Cohan. By 1917, the United States had entered World War I, and Broadway embraced the war effort, with tunes such as Cohan's "Over There" and "You're a Grand Old Flag" becoming part of the national consciousness. But as Broadway began to hold increasing sway over popular taste, experimental theater groups such as the Provincetown Players began to crop up downtown near Greenwich Village, where brash young playwrights such as Eugene O'Neill and Edna St. Vincent Millay penned work that veered radically from Broadway melodrama and mainstream musical entertainment. These off-Broadway playhouses emphasized realism in their plays, and soon their experimentation began to filter onto Broadway.

In 1918, the first Pulitzer Prize for drama was awarded "for the original American play, performed in New York, which shall best represent the educational value and power of the stage in raising the standards of good morals, good taste, and good manners." And by 1920, Eugene O'Neill had his first Broadway hit when the Neighborhood Playhouse production of The Emperor Jones moved to the Selwyn Theatre. In 1921, he would win his first Pulitzer Prize for drama for Anna Christie. He would win a second Pulitzer in the 1920s—the 1927 prize for Strange Interlude. The new realism soon came to peacefully coexist with melodrama and the classics, as the acting careers of such leading ladies as Laurette Taylor, Katherine Cornell, and Eva Le Gallienne, and husband-and-wife acting sensations Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt flourished.

Eugene O'Neill's 1921 "Negro drama," The Emperor Jones, also heralded a remarkable era of the American theater. Inspired by the burgeoning theatrical movement of Ireland, a powerful African-American theater movement had begun to develop during the late 1910s and the 1920s. Plays about the "Negro condition" soon found their way to Broadway and a number of significant African-American stars were born during this era. Chief among these were the incomparable Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters. But with the onslaught of the Great Depression, American concerns turned financial, and African-American actors soon found that mainstream (white) Americans were more focused on their own problems, and many of these actors soon found they were out of work.

But despite the proliferation of superb drama on Broadway, musical theater remained the most popular form of entertainment during the 1910s, and by the 1920s a powerful American musical theater movement was growing in strength and influence under the guidance of Cohan, Kern, Gershwin, Porter, and the team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Songs from such 1920s musical comedies as Gershwin's Girl Crazy, Porter's Anything Goes, Rogers and Hart's A Connecticut Yankee soon became popular hits, and performers such as Ethel Merman, Fred Astaire, and Gertrude Lawrence achieved stardom in this increasingly popular new genre.

In 1927, a new show opened on Broadway—one that would revolutionize the American musical theater. Showboat, written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II,, was the first musical in which character development and dramatic plot assumed equal—if not greater—importance than the music and the performers. In this groundbreaking musical, serious dramatic issues were addressed, accompanied by such memorable songs as "Ol' Man River" and "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man." Music, lyrics, and plot thus became equal partners in creating a uniquely American contribution to the musical theater. Over the next 40 years, Broadway witnessed a golden age in which the modern musical comedy became one of America's unique contributions to the world theater. Richard Rodgers teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II on such classic productions as Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. Another successful duo, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe contributed Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, and Camelot. Other classic musicals of this era included Frank Loesser's Guys and Dolls; Burton Lane and E.Y. Harburg's Finian's Rainbow; Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate; Jule Styne's Gypsy; and Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim's West Side Story. This wealth of material naturally produced a proliferation of musical stars, including Mary Martin, Carol Channing, Chita Rivera, Gwen Verdon, Alfred Drake, Zero Mostel, Rex Harrison, Richard Kiley, Robert Preston, John Raitt, and Julie Andrews.

Although the American musical theater was flourishing, drama also continued to thrive on Broadway. Following the Crash of 1929, however, Broadway momentarily floundered, as Americans no longer had the extra money to spend on entertainment. And when they did, they tended to spend the nickel it cost to go to the movies. And, in fact, many of Broadway's biggest stars were being lured to Hollywood by large movie contracts and the prospect of film careers. But by 1936, the lights were once again burning brightly on the Great White Way—with playwrights such as Lillian Hellman, Maxwell Anderson, John Steinbeck, Noel Coward, Thornton Wilder, Clifford Odets, and William Saroyan churning out critically-acclaimed hits, and American and European actors such as Helen Hayes, Sir John Gielguld, Jose Ferrer, Ruth Gordon, Tallulah Bankhead, and Burgess Meredith drawing-in enthusiastic audiences. A new generation of brash young performers such as Orson Welles, whose Mercury Theater took Broadway by storm during the 1937-38 season, also began to make their mark, as Broadway raised its sights—attempting to rival the well-established theatrical traditions of England and the Continent.

By the start of World War II, Broadway was booming, and stars, producers, and theatergoers alike threw themselves into the war effort. The American Theatre Wing helped to organize the Stage Door Canteen, where servicemen not only were entertained, but also could dance with Broadway stars and starlets. Throughout the war, Broadway stars entertained troops overseas, even as hit shows such as Oklahoma!, This is the Army, The Skin of Our Teeth, Life with Father, and Harvey entertained theatergoers. But change was afoot on the Great White Way. After the war, New York City was flooded with GIs attending school on the U.S. government's dime. Young men and women flocked to the city as the new mecca of the modern world. And amidst the thriving art and theater scenes, a new breed of actor began to emerge during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, trained in the Stanislavski-inspired method by such eminent teachers as Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler. Among these young Turks were future film and theater stars Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and Kim Stanley. Soon a whole new kind of theater took form under the guiding hand of hard-hitting directors such as Elia Kazan and through the pen of such playwrights as Tennessee Williams, whose passionate realism in hit plays such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, and A Streetcar Named Desire changed the face of the American theater.

In 1947, the American Theatre Wing created the first Tony awards—named after Antoinette Perry—to honor the best work on Broadway. But by the 1950s, the burgeoning television industry had come to rival Broadway and Hollywood in influence and popularity—and soon had superseded both. Statistics revealed that less than two percent of the American public attended legitimate theater performances. But Broadway continued to churn out hit musicals at the same time that it remained a breeding ground for cutting-edge new American drama—such as that being written by Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman and The Crucible). And, for the first time in almost thirty years, African Americans were finding work on the Great White Way; in 1958 playwright Lorraine Hansberry won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for Raisin in the Sun, while director Lloyd Richards made his Broadway debut.

On August 23, 1960, Broadway blacked out all its lights for one minute—it was the first time since World War II that all the lights had been dimmed. Oscar Hammerstein II had died; an era had ended. During the 1960s, Broadway continued both to expand its horizons as well as to consolidate its successes by churning out popular hits. After a rocky start, Camelot, starring Richard Burton and Julie Andrews, became a huge hit in 1960—the same year that a controversial production of Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros opened on Broadway. Throughout the decade, mainstream entertainment—plays by the most successful of mainstream playwrights, Neil Simon, and musicals such as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Funny Girl, and Man of La Mancha occupied equal time with radical new work by playwrights such as Edward Albee (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf) and LeRoi Jones. By late in the decade, the new mores of the 1960s had found their way to Broadway. Nudity, profanity, and homosexuality were increasingly commonplace on stage, following the success of such hit shows as Hair and The Boys in the Band. A slew of musicals aimed at the younger generation, incorporating new sounds of soft rock, followed with Stephen Schwartz's Godspell ; Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's Jesus Christ, Superstar ; and the Who's Tommy.

Meanwhile, avant-garde English and European dramatists such as Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, and Samuel Beckett brought their radical new work to Broadway, even as a new kind of musical—the concept musical, created by Stephen Sondheim in such hits as Company and Follies —took the American musical theater in a whole new direction. In this new form of a now time-honored American tradition, narrative plot was superseded by songs, which furthered serial plot developments. Other successful musicals of the type were Kander and Ebb's Cabaret and Chicago, and Michael Bennett's immensely popular A Chorus Line. During the 1970s, two producer-directors who had begun working in the mid-1950s rose to increasing prominence—Hal Prince, who was the guiding hand behind most of Sondheim's hit musicals; and Joseph Papp, whose Public Theatre became the purveyor of New York's high brow and experimental theater.

With the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 came an era of conservatism in which Broadway became the virtual domain of two men—composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and producer Cameron Macintosh. Les Miserables, Cats, Evita, Phantom of the Opera, Sunset Boulevard, and Miss Saigon were among the most successful of the mega-musicals that took over Broadway for more than decade-long runs. At the same time, however, Broadway was hit by the AIDS epidemic, which from 1982 on began to decimate its ranks. Called to activism by the apathy of the Reagan administration, the Broadway community began to rally behind the gay community. In plays from this period such as Torch Song Trilogy, Bent, M. Butterfly, and La Cage aux Folles, homosexuality came out of Broadway's closet for good. And during the decade, increasing numbers of African-American actors, playwrights, and plays found a permanent home on the Great White Way—from the South African-themed plays of Athol Fugard, to the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of August Wilson, to musicals about the lives of such musicians as Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton. Broadway also became increasingly enamored with all things English during the 1980s—from the epic production of Nicholas Nickleby, to the increasing presence of top English stars such as Ian McKellen, to the increasing infatuation with the mega-musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber. But homegrown playwrights such as David Mamet, Neil Simon, John Guare, and August Wilson nonetheless continued to reap the lion's share of the critic's awards, including Pulitzers, New York Drama Critic's Circle, and Tonys.

In the late 1980s, a new phenomenon hit Broadway when Madonna starred in Speed the Plow. In her critically acclaimed performance, the pop and film star boosted Broadway box office sales to such a degree that producers soon began clamoring to find Hollywood stars to headline their plays. Throughout the 1990s, as the mega-musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and popular revivals such as Damn Yankees, Guys and Dolls, and Showboat dominated the box office, Broadway producers sought to make profits by bringing in big names to bolster sales. Over the course of the decade, Hollywood stars such as Kathleen Turner, Robert De Niro, Nicole Kidman, and Glenn Close opened plays and musicals on the Great White Way. But the district received a multi-billion dollar facelift when Disney came into the picture, creating a showcase for its hugely successful musical ventures such as Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. But despite what many critics saw as the increasingly commercialization and suburbanization (playing to the tourists) of Broadway, powerful new voices continued to emerge in the plays of Wendy Wasserstein (The Heidi Chronicles), Tony Kushner (Angels in America), and Jonathan Larson (Rent).

At the millennium, Broadway remains one of America's singular contributions to both high and popular culture. Despite the puissance of the film and television industries, the lure of the legitimate theater remains a strong one. Broadway is at once a popular tourist attraction and the purveyor of the tour de force that is the theater. With its luminous 175-year history sparkling in America's memory, Broadway can look forward to a new century filled with change, innovation, extravaganza, and excess—as the continuing mecca of the American theater.

—Victoria Price