For the past century and a half, the greatest spectacles in American theater have been shown in the theaters along Broadway. Plays, burlesques, vaudevilles, operas and operettas, concerts, minstrel shows, and melodramas all helped to make this the most famous street in the world. It’s actually the oldest street in Manhattan, used as a dirt path by American Indians long before the Dutch settled the area. As the city grew northward, New York’s theater district moved up Broadway, eventually settling in Times Square. By the 1920s the area was so brightly lit with electric bulbs from theater marquees that it was dubbed “The Great White Way.”

The most popular shows on Broadway in the late 19th century were vaudevilles and burlesques; the age of the musical was ushered in by the resounding success of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operetta HMS Pinafore, which opened in 1879. Florenz Ziegfeld’s annual Follies revue, first performed in 1907, pioneered a blend of music, dancing girls, and vaudeville humor that would characterize Broadway for the next thirty years. The following decades saw an explosion of musicals; hundreds were written and performed in the 20s and 30s, most notably Shuffle Along by Sissle and Blake (one of the first Broadway shows written and performed by blacks), A Connecticut Yankee by Rodgers and Hart, and Good News by DeSylvia, Brown, and Henderson. Composer Irving Berlin introduced ragtime music to Broadway with his score for Watch Your Step in 1914; over the next two decades George and Ira Gershwin incorporated jazz music into their work and helped to create a uniquely American genre of musical that combined the operetta format with the vibrant energy of jazz.

By the 40s, Rodgers and Hammerstein were setting the tone with productions like Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific. The 50s and 60s brought more classics like Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady, which had a record–breaking run, Leonard Bernstein’s classic West Side Story, and Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret. Stephen Sondheim exercised a strong influence on Broadway of the 70s and 80s with shows like, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, and Sunday in the Park with George, and Andrew Lloyd Webber broke box office records with Cats and Phantom of the Opera.

The patron saint of Broadway is George M. Cohan, whose statue now stands at Broadway and 46th Street. A singer, playwright, producer, and composer, he worked on Broadway throughout a long and productive career and wrote the “White Way” anthem Give My Regards To Broadway.

Chorus of Give My Regards To Broadway (George M. Cohan, 1904)
Give my regards to Broadway!
Remember me to Herald Square!
Tell all the gang at Forty Second Street
That I will soon be there!
Whisper of how I’m yearning
To mingle with the old time throng!
Give my regards to Old Broadway
And say that I’ll be there, ‘ere long!