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How Broadway Became Broadway
When I started as a drama critic in 1980, I learned how little I knew about how the theater business actually works.
The advent of sound in Hollywood six years ahead of the Busby Berkeley 42nd Street had already triggered a Broadway decline, knocking the number of new productions down to 174 for the 1932–33 season from its peak of 264 in 1927–28, when The Jazz Singer supercharged talking pictures’ usurpation of the stage as the foremost medium of American mass entertainment. Until they were caught in the act by its producer, they even tried to truncate the run of the original 1943 production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, the longest-running musical in Broadway history at the time, apparently by withholding tickets from its box-office racks at the St. James Theatre so the grosses would drop low enough to trigger a contractually mandated eviction. The year before, ushering in the atmosphere of impending doom, five playhouses near Times Square were razed to consummate a real-estate deal in which a brutalist Marriott hotel would be built on the sites of the original Broadway productions of the signature 20th-century American dramas Death of a Salesman and Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
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