Winners of the Tony for Best Musical
75 productions
Winners of the Tony for Best Musical, every year from 1949 on.
A collection is a question the catalogue can answer. Seven rotate by the day of the week. The rest sit still, waiting for somebody to wonder how many shows have an exclamation mark in the title.
75 productions
Winners of the Tony for Best Musical, every year from 1949 on.
119 shows
These shows have a production listed that opened before the show was written. Gypsy has stagings from 1903 and 1929, decades before the 1959 musical, because two different works en…
75 shows
Shows set outside America — Paris, Vienna, Siam, and a few kingdoms that only ever existed on a stage.
49 shows
The Black Crook in 1866 through to 1919. Recording barely existed for most of this, so what survives is paper.
407 productions
Shows that played once. Some are disasters — six opened and shut at the Nora Bayes in 1923 alone. Others are benefits and galas that were only ever meant to happen once. The data r…
39 productions
Runs of 2,000 performances or more. Phantom of the Opera gave 13,981. The Lion King has passed ten thousand and is still going.
68 shows
Revivals that ran longer than the original. Chicago managed 936 performances in 1975 and 9,999 when it came back. Candide ran 73 nights in 1956 and returned for 740.
44 shows
Titles with an exclamation mark. Oh, Kay! Lady, Be Good! Hit The Deck! Hooray For What! Nearly all of them are from before 1940. Then it stopped.
20 shows
The Black Crook, The Red Mill, The Pink Lady, The Green Pastures, The Color Purple. A century and a half of shows named for a colour.
201 shows
Sally. Irene. Sinbad. Maytime. Gypsy. Hair. Chicago. Rent. One word on the marquee, and it has worked for a hundred years.
21 shows
Sally, Irene, Rosalie, Nanette, Gypsy, Evita, Annie. For fifty years the surest way to sell a musical was to name it after the woman at the centre of it.
78 shows
Follies of 1907. Blackbirds of 1928. New Faces of 1952. 78 shows put a number in the title, and most of them are annuals announcing that last year's edition is over.
9 shows
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn "A New Musical". Carnival in Flanders "A Musical Comedy". For a few years in the early fifties the billing was part of the title, because the producers wer…
26 shows
Forty characters and up, before the subtitle has even started. Shuffle Along, Or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed is the longest here and The Curio…
21 shows
Call Me Madam. Mr Wonderful. Miss Liberty. The honorific title is a promise about the leading role and it is almost always kept.
41 shows
Guys and Dolls. Kiss Me, Kate has no and; Porgy and Bess does. 41 titles are a pairing, which is the oldest way in English to promise a story about two people who want different th…
41 shows
Stop the World — I Want to Get Off. Follow the Girls. Hold Everything! Let 'Em Eat Cake. Look, Ma, I'm Dancin'! The imperative title is the sound of a musical comedy shouting from…
31 shows
Oklahoma! Brigadoon. Chicago. Carousel is not a place and Camelot is. 31 shows take their name from a location, real or invented, which commits the set designer before a word is wr…
22 shows
Somebody read it first. Cry, the Beloved Country became Lost in the Stars; Voltaire became Candide; a 1957 novel about San Francisco became Flower Drum Song.
19 shows
The traffic runs both ways, but this is the direction people forget. All About Eve became Applause. Some Like It Hot became Sugar. 8½ became Nine.
15 shows
A straight play with the songs added. Pygmalion became My Fair Lady, Green Grow the Lilacs became Oklahoma!, and Charley's Aunt became Where's Charley?
164 shows
Every show here is based on something — a novel, a film, a play, somebody's life. Adaptation is how a great many of Broadway's best-loved shows got made.
17 shows
Shows about Hollywood, written mostly by people who had worked there. Matched on the name anywhere in the synopsis, so these are shows about the place rather than shows set in it.
12 shows
Built from songs that already existed. Jersey Boys, Movin' Out, Rock of Ages, Million Dollar Quartet, Mamma Mia!
12 shows
Revues, follies, scandals and vanities — sketches, songs and showgirls, produced fresh every season. For thirty years this was the most reliable business on Broadway.
112 shows
Sally sings Sally. Hello, Dolly! says hello to Dolly. Shows with a song that carries the show's own name.
22 shows
Twenty-five numbers or more. Before the book musical settled down, a score could run to forty songs and nobody thought it strange.
37 shows
Show Boat, Porgy and Bess, Gypsy, Oklahoma!, Fiddler. The shows Broadway keeps going back to, staging after staging.
497 shows
One Broadway staging and nothing since. Some are famous flops; plenty simply never got a second look.
300 shows
The show where somebody arrived. Girl Crazy in 1930 was Ethel Merman's first Broadway credit; Brigadoon was Helen Gallagher's. Every show here is the earliest credit of a performer…
12 productions
The two thousand nights and up, from the years the British imports took the street. Helicopters, chandeliers, a barricade and a logo you could sell on a mug.
198 shows
One Broadway staging, no recording, and nothing since. Two hundred of them before 1960. Somebody wrote a score for every single one and you will not find a note of it anywhere.
204 productions
Broadway opens in October — 1,610 productions have. It does not open in July, when 199 have. These are the shows that went up in the heat anyway, into a half-empty town with no air…
1,617 productions
The month Broadway actually starts. More productions have opened in October than in any other, and it is not close.