The world’s two most famous theatre districts are the West End in London and Broadway in New York. Both are names that are synonymous with bright lights, as well as artistic and commercial success. Technically, Broadway is a street that runs the entire length of Manhattan, but the theatres are based in the midtown section around Times Square.
One person who knows a lot about Broadway is Laurent Nahon, an actor, teacher and tour guide who runs his own company, Laurent Tours. We asked him to explain the history of Broadway:
Laurent Nahon (Standard American accent): New York City as an experiment, as a city, as a young city, actually began in 1625, when New York was first born. We’ve always had... entertainment. Entertainment has moved uptown as the people of the city has (have) moved uptown, meaning north. The city started at the very bottom of the island of Manhattan and grew from there, and the entertainment did the same thing. In about 1920, ’30, ‘40 we built what is now the Broadway district and we stopped at that level, meaning we did not continue building entertainment houses past approximately 53rd Street.
Today we have 40 Broadway theatres; they each have more than 500 seats, the majority of them; more than 30 of those buildings have more than 1,000 seats. So it’s a wonderful phenomenon that happens every night in New York, where we have more than 55,000 people coming in and out of one area of New York City.
The american MUSICAL
There are essentially two types of Broadway show: plays and musicals. Musicals have become dominant in recent years, while plays are more common in fringe theatres, either ‘off Broadway’, or even ‘off off Broadway’. Many theatre fans are unhappy about this but, as Laurent Nahon says, the musical is a great American genre:
Laurent Nahon: We took the descendants of Russia, and the descendants of Italy, and the descendants of France, and the descendants of Europe, and all of those young people grew up listening to the operas of their parents and their grandparents, and, when they were young men themselves, they developed what was right for them; their music, their dance, and that was born into and developed what we now know as the American musical comedy, or the American musical.
oklahoma!
So when did this happen?
Laurent Nahon: Depending on who you talk to, which scholar you talk to, it was in the late 1800s, there was a first musical called The Black Crook. Then, if you move forward about 40 years later, you have another musical called Showboat in 1927. Some consider that the first American musical, and then you move to 1943, during World War Two, when Rodgers and Hammerstein write, compose and have the dance to go along with a musical called Oklahoma! From that we have many genres of musical theatre.
These days
And if the Broadway musical has a glorious past, then Laurent Nahon thinks that it also has a great future:
Laurent Nahon: I see that we’re moving a little bit more towards family-oriented musicals right now. In a couple of months we have a new musical called Matilda coming in from London, Annie has a revival playing on Broadway right now, we have the musicals of Disney now. So we have Mary Poppins playing on Broadway right now, we have The Lion King playing on Broadway right now. These musicals are all doing very, very well, which tells me that younger people – and by ‘young’ I mean even younger than 12 or 13 years old – are coming back to the theatre. Families, adults are bringing their children to the theatre more now than they did when I first came to New York 20 years ago.