New York Theater: On and Off-Broadway

Introduction

New York City and professional theater in the United States are such natural associations that it takes an effort of the historical imagination to recall that, in the days before sound movies came along, virtually every city had a theater for visiting performances and larger cities had resident stock companies of their own. Early in the nineteenth century, however, New York City established its centrality in the nation’s theatrical activity, and with time came the preeminence of Broadway as a theater district and as an international entertainment icon. Even now, after many economic and artistic vicissitudes, Broadway is to theater what Hollywood is to movies—the mainstream, the standard setter. If Broadway signifies mainstream, Off-Broadway (and its 1960s sibling Off-Off-Broadway) means experiment, unorthodoxy, and quite often outrageous provocation.

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Theater in New York City long predates the emergence of Times Square as its geographical and symbolic center. As it did everywhere in the United States, the theater had a slow and uncertain early development in New York. The historical record shows no true professional theatrical activity in the city before approximately 1750, when Englishmen Walter Murray and Thomas Kean presented ’s Richard III (pr. c. 1592-1593) in the Nassau Street Theatre, a venue used before only for amateur theatricals. Another British group, the Hallam Brothers’ London Company of Comedians (later renamed the American Company), successfully promoted the construction of three new theaters, the main one being at John Street in lower Manhattan. The repertory of these pioneer troupes was entirely British, including Richard III, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (pr. c. 1596-1597), and ’s Cato (pr. 1713).

The American Revolution (1776-1783) put a temporary end to professional theatrical activity in New York City, but when the theaters reopened there were American playwrights and American plays to join the previous repertoire of British imports. ’s historically important The Contrast was presented at the John Street Theater in April 1787, and 1789 saw the debut (also at the John Street Theater) of ’s The Father: Or, American Shandyism. Dunlap’s busy and prolific career in theater would earn him the unofficial title of Father of American Drama.

When the John Street Theater closed in 1798, New York’s center of theatrical activity became the Park Theatre, which was also managed by the versatile Dunlap. For the next quarter century, the Park was the leading theatrical venue in the city, serving as the American performing home to leading performers from England and helping to develop native-born acting talent, such as Edwin Forrest, J. H. Hackett, and Charlotte Cushman.

Well into the nineteenth century, the United States remained culturally dependent on England and Europe. Thus, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Shakespeare remained the most frequently acted playwright in New York. American subjects for the stage did emerge, however. Besides Tyler and Dunlap, the list of American playwrights who successfully staged American situations and themes include John Augustus Stone (Metamora: Or, The Last of the Wampanoags, pr. 1829). Though not the first American play to put the figure of the Native American at its center, Metamora was certainly the most popular of the era. Other notable plays on the New York stage included Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion (pr. 1845); Benjamin A. Baker’s A Glance at New York (pr. 1848) with its street-tough fireman Mose, a part that generated countless imitations; ’s The Octoroon: Or, Life in Louisiana (pr. 1859, 1861); Frank Murdoch’s Davy Crockett (pr. 1872); and, most important of all, George L. Aiken’s adaptation of ’s abolitionist classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly (pr. 1852).

As the nineteenth century came to an end, New York City was firmly established as the national center of American theater, but the theater district known today as Broadway was still a work in progress. In the 1850s, New York theater meant Greenwich Village. During the 1870s and 1880s, the theaters had moved farther uptown, but it was not until the 1900-1930 period that the Longacre (now Times) Square area became the Broadway of theater history and legend.

1900-1945

Between 1900 and 1928, approximately eighty theaters were built between Thirty-ninth and Fifty-fourth Streets within a block or two of Broadway. Many of these, having undergone much transformation and renovation, still function as theatrical venues today. New names emerged in the creative ranks of New York and Broadway theater. The popular musical theater, which had begun in various forms of revues on other nonnarrative formats, began to crystallize as a storytelling mode with the popularity in the United States of and Sir Arthur Sullivan and the development of the homegrown operetta of Sigmund Romberg and Victor Herbert.

The modern drama of England and the European continent began to have its impact on New York playwrights and audiences, introducing uncharacteristically realistic content and style into this entertainment world. Melodramas gave way to the influence of and . The American playwrights who most exemplified the new realism include , , James A. Herne, and William Vaughn Moody.

In the area of straight (nonmusical) drama, the 1920s and early 1930s might be called the Age of O’Neill. Eugene O’Neill, the introverted, serious son of flamboyant nineteenth-century star of the stage melodrama James O’Neill, saw his first play produced on Cape Cod by the Provincetown Players. This group moved to New York and in 1916 launched O’Neill’s New York career with Bound East for Cardiff (in tandem with ’s Trifles, pr. 1916). In 1920, Beyond the Horizon won O’Neill his first of four Pulitzer Prizes in Drama; Anna Christie (pr. 1921) won him his second. Other powerful dramas from O’Neill during the 1920s and 1930s include The Emperor Jones (pr. 1920), The Hairy Ape (pr. 1922), All God’s Chillun Got Wings (pr. 1924), Desire Under the Elms (pr. 1924), Strange Interlude (pr. 1928), Mourning Becomes Electra (pr. 1931), Ah, Wilderness! (pr. 1933), and The Iceman Cometh (pr. 1946). O’Neill won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936, but his influence declined, beginning in the late 1930s, until a posthumous production of Long Day’s Journey into Night (pr. 1956) reestablished his position as the leading American playwright of the first half of the twentieth century.

The American theater produced many other fine playwrights during this period, many of whom deserve to be better known. A concise list would include , , , , , , and . Their work embraced the whole range of genres from sophisticated comedy to social realism and various forms of experimental theater.

The story of the drama of the era was not only its important playwrights. Orson Welles and John Houseman contributed monumentally to the vitality of the New York stage in their work with the Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939) and their own Mercury Theatre. Also worth remembering are the Living Newspaper productions of the Federal Theatre Project and a number of significant novels that were adapted into striking theatrical successes, including ’s Native Son (pr. 1941), ’s Tobacco Road (pr. 1933), and ’s It Can’t Happen Here (pr. 1936).

1945 and After

Despite all this creativity, the popularity of the live stage was slowly but steadily being undermined by the rising competition for audiences from sound movies. In the years after World War II, it would be the work of a new generation of strong playwrights, the reinvention of the Broadway musical, and the development of a lively and adventurous experimental theater Off-Broadway that would keep the theater alive in New York.

The first of the new generation of playwrights was His first Broadway success came in 1945, when The Glass Menagerie (first produced a year earlier) opened at the Playhouse Theatre on Broadway. The play’s lyricism and its sensitive exploration of family relationships, loneliness, and power of memory have had a lasting impact on the American theater. Williams’s next play, A Streetcar Named Desire (pr. 1947), dropped lyricism in favor of a tough, sexually charged naturalism, both in action and in speech. Elia Kazan directed Marlon Brando, Kim Stanley, Karl Malden, and Jessica Tandy in the first Broadway production. Other powerful plays of sexual passion and repression followed, the most notable including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (pr. 1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (pr. 1959), and The Night of the Iguana (pr. 1961).

Williams’s primary rival for greatness between the late 1940s and the early 1960s was with All My Sons (pr. 1947) and Death of a Salesman (pr. 1949), Miller established himself as a powerful dramatist of the family, but also one with a strong political point of view. Not as lyrical as Williams, Miller used the stage to challenge the American national conscience about its private and public values. In no play of his is this aspect more clearly exposed than in The Crucible (pr. 1953), which uses the infamous Salem witch trials to expose and attack the political inquisitions of Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s. Other fine work followed with A View from the Bridge (pr. 1955), After the Fall (pr. 1964), Incident at Vichy (pr. 1964), and The Price (pr. 1968).

Williams and Miller were not the only interesting playwrights in the postwar years. Midwesterner emerged in 1950 with Come Back, Little Sheba to challenge Williams and Miller for Broadway supremacy. He followed Come Back, Little Sheba with Picnic (pr. 1953), Bus Stop (pr. 1955), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (pr. 1959). Sympathetically drawn characterizations and a gift for natural, quietly poetic dialogue marked his work. Other thoughtful, popular playwrights on Broadway in the 1950s include George Axelrod (The Seven Year Itch, pr. 1952), (Tea and Sympathy, pr. 1953), Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (Inherit the Wind, pr. 1955), Dore Schary (Sunrise at Campobello, pr. 1958), (Two for the Seesaw, pr. 1958, and The Miracle Worker, stage pr. 1959), and Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun, pr. 1959).

A new generation of Broadway playwrights arrived in the 1960s. followed a series of strikingly original absurdist Off-Broadway one-acts with the electrifying mainstream hit Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (pr. 1962). No single Albee play since has had a corresponding impact, but the playwright fashioned a distinguished career both on and off Broadway with plays like A Delicate Balance (pr. 1966), Seascape (pr. 1975), and Three Tall Women (pr. 1991), all Pulitzer Prize winners.

Come Blow Your Horn (pr. 1960) was s debut, and he went on to be the most commercially successful Broadway playwright in the postwar years. After 1960, hardly a year passed without a Simon comedy on the stage, and in many years he had two or more running simultaneously. Since the 1960s, Simon’s laugh-filled domestic comedies have kept audiences filling the theaters for hits like The Odd Couple (pr. 1965), Chapter Two (pr. 1977), Broadway Bound (pr. 1986), and Lost in Yonkers (pr. 1991). After the run of Brighton Beach Memoirs (pr. 1982) at the classic Alvin Theatre, its owners, the Nederlander organization, renamed the theater the Neil Simon Theatre in 1983, as high an unofficial honor as Broadway has for its notables.

Since the 1970s, playwrights who have moved back and forth between Off-Broadway and Broadway include , , , , and .

Musical Theater

On the musical front, the popularity of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Oklahoma! (pr. 1943) did for the musical theater what A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman had done for the straight play. It set an example of inventiveness and energy that raised the bar for its successors and made “Broadway musical” a household word, not just for New Yorkers but for city visitors for whom a ticket to a popular Broadway musical became an inseparable part of a trip to New York City.

The 1940s and 1950s saw the team of Rodgers and Hammerstein succeed with Carousel (pr. 1949), South Pacific (pr. 1949), The King and I (pr. 1951), and The Sound of Music (pr. 1959), all of which went on to Hollywood film adaptations and, over the years, to road tours and revivals. Some other successful musicals during these years were The Pajama Game (pr. 1954), Damn Yankees (pr. 1955), My Fair Lady (pr. 1956), and West Side Story (pr. 1957).

In the 1960s and 1970s, musical theater became more aggressive in its selection of subject matter and, in particular, its expression of sexuality onstage. Hal Prince's Cabaret (pr. 1966) led the way with its outrageous Kit-Kat Club girls and a slyly salacious performance by Joel Grey as the Emcee. In 1968, the rock musical Hair brought Age of Aquarius nudity to Broadway.

Key figures in the new musical were producer-director Prince and choreographer-directors Bob Fosse (Pippin, pr. 1972; Chicago, pr. 1975; and Dancin’, pr. 1978) and Michael Bennett, whose A Chorus Line (pr. 1975) built its book from the personal experiences of members of its original cast and became one of the longest-running musicals of its era. If the art of the dance drove the work of Fosse and Bennett, score and lyrics set the work of Stephen Sondheim apart from anyone else. Working with Prince, Sondheim produced the most consistently innovative and distinguished musicals of the second half of the twentieth century, including Company (pr. 1970), A Little Night Music (pr. 1973), Pacific Overtures (pr. 1976), Sweeney Todd (pr. 1979), and, with James Lapine, Sunday in the Park with George (pr. 1983) and Into the Woods (pr. 1987).

In the 1990s, the Broadway musical was sustained by the expensive, long-running, heavily toured “mega-musical.” Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats (pr. 1982) and The Phantom of the Opera (pr. 1988) were the exemplars, but the Disney corporation stepped in strongly, completely renovating the classic New Amsterdam Theatre on Forty-second Street and opening it with the spectacular The Lion King (pr. 1997), directed by Julie Taymor.

Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway

The term Broadway became a specific location along Broadway (the Times Square area) and a representative of commercialism in American theater. For good or ill, it became a high-stakes, high-pressure zone where (some felt) money talked more loudly than art.

The first Off-Broadway was a reaction to Broadway commercialism. Long before the term “Off-Broadway” was coined in the 1950s, a number of small, independent theaters had been developed, mainly, but not exclusively, in lower Manhattan. These included the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre (began 1915) on the Lower East Side, the Provincetown Players (begun in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1916, later moving to New York City), and the Group Theatre formed by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford to promote the Konstantin Stanislavsky method of actor training and new playwrights with strong political foci.

The Off-Broadway known today came into being in the early 1950s when director José Quintero reestablished lower Manhattan as a theatrical center with the Circle in the Square Theatre. Other notable Off-Broadway companies include the Living Theatre of Judith Malina and Julian Beck, which started in Greenwich Village and found audiences for its radical theater in venues around the world, and the New York Shakespeare Festival, headed by Off-Broadway impresario Joseph Pappmdash; arguably the most important single figure in the Off-Broadway movement. Papp fought City Hall to bring free Shakespeare to Central Park and to ghetto neighborhoods, and he orchestrated an expansion into the East Village scene with the New York Public Theatre.

Variety, more than anything, typified Off-Broadway theater. Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt opened The Fantasticks (pr. 1960) for what would become a lyrical four-decade run, while at the St. Mark’s Playhouse, Gene Frankel presented The Blacks (pr. 1961) with a high-powered and outspoken cast of African American actors that included James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson, Godfrey Cambridge, and Lou Gossett, Jr. The St. Mark’s Playhouse also became home to the Negro Ensemble Company formed by Robert Hooks, Gerald Krone, and Douglas Turner Ward. With new plays by playwrights such as and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Off-Broadway soon began to outproduce Broadway in both numbers of productions and variety and innovation.

The line between Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway is a fine one because, geographically, they intermingle, particularly in lower Manhattan. The Actors’ Equity Association made one functional distinction by allowing Equity actors to work out of Equity pay scale in theater spaces of fewer than one hundred seats for limited runs. This allowed small theater operations located in churches, coffeehouses, and other small venues to stay alive as Off-Broadway itself began to enjoy commercial success and attract uptown money. At a philosophical level, Off-Off-Broadway came to define a theater where the performance of radical politics, sexualities, and theatrical practices could be indulged with a freedom that began to make Off-Broadway look conservative. Pioneers in this movement include Joe Cino’s Caffé Cino, the Performance Group, and the Judson Poet’s Theater. Venues like these fostered the early work of , , , , and other talented playwrights and performers. Gradually, the term Off-Off-Broadway expanded to include a variety of group theaters (including the Theatre for the New City, the Wooster Group, Mabou Mines, Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatre Company, and Playwrights Horizons) and individual performance artists.

While New York theater (Broadway in particular) often comes under fire for commercial opportunism and artistic timidity, it has remained alive by an interesting balancing act of compromise and experiment. Ultimately, there is still nothing quite like the social experience of going to a New York theater to share a show with live performers, a lively animated audience, and a city which has made live theater a part of its core identity. Each show, no matter how transient, reconnects every audience to a shared cultural activity as old as the most ancient sacred ritual and as contemporary as today’s The Village Voice or The New York Times.

The Twenty-first Century

As expenses increased for the average American through the 2020s, theaters nationwide struggled to fill seats, including prominent Broadway theaters. However, many Off-Broadway works across genres captivated audiences, selling out their shows. Long-time Off-Broadway producer Eva Price noted she waited many years for this boom in popularity and credits the success to “meeting the moment” with relevant themes and tones that allow theater-goers an escape from reality. Others credited brilliantly executed, fresh ideas. Producer Alex Levy pointed out the importance of understanding and advertising to New York’s changing, younger demographic as less conventional shows and venues appealed to theatergoers under forty.

One of these successful Off-Broadway works is Titanique (2017), a Céline Dion musical parody of the 1997 film Titanic produced by Eva Price at the Daryl Roth Theatre in the 2020s. Written by Marla Mindelle, Constantine Rousouli, and Tye Blue, the show consistently sold out its seats for over a year and earned several awards. After the show, many viewers lined up to pose with a cardboard cutout of Céline’s character, which they posted online, indirectly advertising for the show. This modern marketing strategy, leveraging the power of social media, has proven to be a key factor in the success of Off-Broadway shows. Though vastly different in tone, theme, and message, Job (2023) from producer Alex Levy and Oh, Mary! (2024) by Cole Escola, who plays Mary Todd Lincoln in the play, also sold out their Off-Braodway seats. Job is a serious production while Oh, Mary! is outrageous and funny, but both appealed to modern audiences.

Several trends emerged in Broadway productions in the twenty-first century. Reflecting the industry's commitment to inclusivity, more female writers, directors, musicians, and choreographers worked on major productions than ever before. Also, many celebrities joined theater casts. For example, Rachel McAdams in Mary Jane (2017), Steve Carell in Uncle Vanya (2024), Wayne Brady in The Wiz (2024), and Daniel Radcliffe in Merrily We Roll Along (2023). Continuing a long-running trend, productions like The Heart of Rock (2024), Stereophonic (2023), and The Who's Tommy (2024) featured classic rock music. Additionally, many literary adaptations and revivals of classic Broadway plays reached the stage, including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967), Nicholas Sparks’s The Notebook (1996), and Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants (2006).

Bibliography

Eliot, Marc. Down Forty-Second Street: Sex, Money, Culture, and Politics at the Crossroads of the World. Warner Books, 2001.

Frommer, M. Katz, et al. It Happened on Broadway: An Oral History of the Great White Way. Harcourt, 1998.

Henderson, Mary C. Theater in America: Two Hundred Fifty Years of Plays, Players, and Productions. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.

Little, Stuart W. Off-Broadway: The Prophetic Theater. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1972.

Oleksinski, Johnny. "Off-Broadway is Booming — and It’s a Lesson for Theaters Everywhere." New York Post, 20 Mar. 2024, nypost.com/2024/03/20/entertainment/off-broadway-is-booming-and-its-a-lesson-for-theaters-everywhere. Accessed 31 Aug. 2024.

Wilmeth, Don B., and Christopher Bigsby, editors. The Cambridge History of American Theater. Cambridge UP, 1998. 3 vols.