One night at the Ford Center

Three productions opened on Broadway in September 2001. This catalogue holds all three, and the shape they make is the reason it exists.

On the 10th, Mandy Patinkin in Concert played the Neil Simon Theatre. One performance. It opened and closed the same night, and the night in question was the night before. Broadway went dark on the 11th, stayed dark on the 12th, and reopened on the 13th at the urging of Mayor Giuliani and the city's Commissioner of Cultural Affairs.

On the 20th, Urinetown opened at Henry Miller's Theatre and ran 965 performances. Nathan Hurwitz, in A History of the American Musical Theatre, puts it plainly: “Urinetown opened on September 20, nine days after the attacks, and made people laugh.” It took Best Book, Best Score and Best Direction that season and lost Best Musical, which Steven Suskin's Broadway Yearbook records as the first time any show had managed that.

On the 24th, Dreamgirls played the Ford Center for one performance — a twentieth-anniversary benefit for The Actors Fund, with Audra McDonald, Heather Headley and Lillias White as the three Dreams and a company that took in Billy Porter, Norm Lewis, Alice Ripley, Emily Skinner, Tamara Tunie and Patrick Wilson. Brian Stokes Mitchell, then the Fund's president, opened the evening with a speech and took a cameo. It raised $1.1 million. Two sources disagree about who ran it: our production record, which comes from IBDB, credits Brenda Braxton as director and choreographer, while The Actors Fund's own account of the night names Seth Rudetsky as musical and artistic director. Both are on the page, unreconciled, which is the house policy where sources conflict.

Now the part worth noticing. Of those three, the one that ran for a single evening is the one that produced a permanent commercial recording. Nonesuch issued it in 2002 as Dreamgirls in Concert (2001 New York concert cast) — catalogue 79656-2, barcode 075597965629, two discs. The Cover Art Archive holds no image of it at all, which is its own small problem for a catalogue that identifies records by their sleeves.

The 965-performance hit had already been recorded. RCA Victor put its album out on 7 August 2001, six weeks before the Broadway opening, and MusicBrainz bills it as Urinetown (2001 original off-Broadway cast) — 09026-63821-2. The record documents the run that preceded the transfer. The Tonys went to the production that opened after it.

Neither record is in this catalogue yet. That is the gap, stated exactly: two album titles carrying a date and a place, and somebody has to work out which staging each one documents. One is a single evening at the Ford Center on 24 September 2001. The other is a production that had closed before the album reached the shops.

Sources: Broadway shutdown and reopening, 11–13 September 2001; Hurwitz and Suskin, quoted from the excerpts on the Urinetown page; Dreamgirls benefit: cast, cameo, $1.1 million (Playbill); The Actors Fund's own account of the night; Nonesuch 79656-2 — MusicBrainz release; RCA Victor 09026-63821-2 — MusicBrainz release

On the record

1,176 productions have opened in September since 1866. 23 of them belong to a show with a recording in this catalogue.

Read that as a statement about our holdings rather than about history. We hold 237 albums against 13,459 productions, and they arrived as a by-product of an image-sourcing pass rather than from a discography. Both records named above exist and neither is here. When that number moves, this is where it gets reported.

The absence underneath it is real, though. 329 shows in the catalogue carry a full song list, a named cast and no recording of any kind — a score and no record of it. Somebody wrote every one of those scores. You will not hear most of them.

Elsewhere

Countess Maritza opened at the Shubert on 18 September 1926 and ran 321 performances. Emmerich Kálmán wrote it; Harry B. Smith did the English. It had already premiered in Vienna two and a half years earlier, on 28 February 1924 at the Theater an der Wien, to a German libretto by Julius Brammer and Alfred Grünwald. We hold three stagings: the Shubert, a sixteen-performance revival at the Century in 1928, and a transfer to the Palace in London in July 1938.

Recordings here: none.

Search MusicBrainz for the Broadway title and you get exactly one result. It is a ten-inch shellac, Victor 20138, issued in October 1926, and it is Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra playing “Countess Maritza” on the back of “The Birth of the Blues.” A dance band covering a tune from a hit. Nothing to do with the cast.

Search the German title and you get twelve releases. Polydor in 1958 and again in 1969, Karussell in 1976, EMI twice in the mid-eighties, Warner in 1988, Camerata Tokyo in 2003, OehmsClassics in Austria in 2004.

The operetta was never missing. The title string was.

Sources: “Gräfin Mariza” — MusicBrainz release search; Victor 20138 — Whiteman, October 1926

New in the catalogue

Pictures
654 of 939 show pages now lead with an image the show owns — a sleeve, a playbill, a production still. Count the borrowed portraits, which we run under a sentence saying whose face it is and why it is there, and 883 lead with something. 56 shows have nothing at all.

The West End
West End data has started arriving, which is the first crack in a production tier that until now was Broadway and nothing else. It has also produced this month's correction, below.

Upstream
broadway-data applied a bundle of our corrections, and we now read their file as the source of truth for productions rather than keeping a patched copy alongside it. Fewer places for the same fact to disagree with itself.

The month, counted

Every count above is measured against the catalogue on the day the issue is built, so an issue read later reports the catalogue as it was when it was sent. The structural figures in New in the catalogue were measured 16 August 2026.