10 Longest Running Broadway Shows12

By Chris Littler, Nov 19, 2010 in Pop Culture

10 Longest Running Broadway Shows

To be a show on “Broadway” doesn’t necessarily mean that the show’s curtains rise and fall on Broadway. In fact, very few of the forty 500-plus-seat theatres that constitute “Broadway” are actually on the street itself. Most are on the ten or so side streets that intersect Times Square, inside the area generally referred to as the Theatre District.

To be a Broadway show can mean a lot of different things, but the one common thing they all share is a great property, a great cast, and a hell of a lot of luck. If you make it on Broadway, you’ve genuinely “made it.” That’s why so many people try. Unfortunately, there are a lot of companies and productions that never quite “make it” – like the collection of misfits that comprise the cast of The NoHo Show, a series about a bumbling theater group in the outskirts of Los Angeles. In fact, only a handful of shows in Broadway’s 250-year history have ever gone on to legendary status. Let’s take a look at ten of them that found success in the Big Apple.

The NoHo Show – Theater Hard

10. Miss Saigon – 4,097 performances

Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil’s musical about a doomed romance between an American GI and a Vietnamese bar girl opened on the West End of London on April 11, 1991 and ran for a whopping 4,264 performances. Its success in London was eclipsed only by the success it had in America, where it ran at the Broadway Theatre for 4,097 performances before being airlifted by helicopter into legend. The musical, based on Madame Butterfly, the story of a Japanese woman being abandoned by her American lover, is the first of Giacomo Puccini’s operas to be successfully American-ified. Interestingly enough, Puccini himself claimed that he based the opera on the short story by an American writer, which makes Ms. Saigon the product of two Frenchman’s Americanized take on a German composer’s opera, which he himself based on an American’s short story.

9. Rent – 5,123 performances

Rent is also based on one of Puccini’s operas, La Boheme, the story of a love affair between a flirtatious seamstress named Mimi and the poet Rodolfo. Playwright Billy Aronson came up with the idea of supplanting the story in modern day New York City, and met up with Jonathan Larson, who eventually took the reigns and created the show that we know and love today. Larson never lived to see the finished product, sadly, as he died of an aortic dissection on the morning the show was planned to have its off-Broadway premiere. What happened next is the stuff of Broadway legend. With the Larson family’s blessing, the cast performed the show sitting at three prop tables set up on stage. By the time the song number La Vie Boheme came around, they could no longer contain themselves and leapt to their feet, performing the show full-throttle, as it was meant to be. It’s the same kind of unavoidable kinetic energy that audiences felt every night for a mind-blowing 5,123 performances, until the final performance on September 8th, 2008.

8. The Lion King – 5,365 performances

The story of the Simba’s quest for revenge against his tyrannical and regicidal uncle, Scar, borrows heavily from two major dramatic touchstones: the story of Moses, and the story of Hamlet. That’s one heck of a pedigree, and might also explain the global musical entity that is The Lion King. The show, which of course is based on the 1994 animated feature of the same name, has since been performed in every major city on the planet, with a total of 5,365 performances on Broadway. It even has a stage named after it in Germany. The show’s craftsmanship and attention to detail is unparalleled, and shows that the Disney name still means something, even in the stuffy world of high-end theatre.

7. Beauty and the Beast – 5,461 performances

The Disney-fication of Broadway began on April 18th, 1994, when Beauty and the Beast roared into the Palace Theatre. It’s difficult these days to imagine a Broadway without some Disney magic in the air, but back in 1993, Broadway was a much less family-friendly place. It wasn’t until a New York Times theatre critic noted that the cartoon film was the best new musical of the year, that the powers that be at Disney considered milking the pocketbooks of legitimate theatre-goers. The Mouse House teamed up with Houston’s Theatre Under the Stars to workshop the show before bringing it to the Great White Way, where musical-lovers and Disney-philes alike flocked to the pitch-perfect reimagining of the girl-falls-in-love-with-beast-and-fixes-his-problems classic. And thus a trend was born that doesn’t show any clear signs of stopping.

6. Chicago – 5,780 performances

The original Chicago was a play written by reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins, who covered the trials of two murderesses with a sensationalism that elevated her to prominence. Cut to forty years later, Bob Fosse’s wife reads the play and tells her husband that it would make a great musical. Unexpectedly, the musical debuted the same year as number four on this list and was soundly defeated in all contests of criticism and ticket sales. In fact, the show nearly shut down when lead Gwen Verdon inhaled a feather in the finale and got a throat infection. Then Liza Minelli stepped in at the last minute. She kept the show running and guaranteed that the show would go on to break box office records and feature the likes of Bebe Neuwirth, Renée Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

5. Oh! Calcutta! – 5,959 performances

British drama critic Kenneth Tynan’s Oh! Calcutta! is the black sheep of this bunch, and for several reasons. The first being that Oh! Calcutta! doesn’t have a story per se. It’s more of a series of loosely connected sketches united around a common theme… sex. The second being that Oh! Calcutta! is performed mostly in the nude. Since the order of the evening is to discover and make light of our national sexual identity (circa 1969), it only makes sense that the theatre-camp hardbodies who make up the cast disrobe for most of the show. And last, but not least, the iteration of Oh! Calcutta! that made it to the 5,959 performance mark wasn’t the original, but a revival. How positively scandalous!

4. A Chorus Line – 6,137 performances

Cheap sets, thrift store costumes and lots of yelling at dancers on the stage – it seems crazy that it took until 1975 for there to be a show about a chorus line audition, the original mockumentary. A Chorus Line is about as simple a plot as it gets: seventeen desperate dancers are run through the ringer by a demanding director who forces them to tell excruciatingly personal anecdotes about themselves. As the story goes on, we learn more and more about each individual, until they’re all separate in our minds, only to have them come together in an amorphous chorus line at the end. It’s a parable for the modern age, where individualism meets the box step.

3. Les Miserables – 6,680 performances

Based on the Victor Hugo novel of the same name, the musical version of Les Miserables follows French ex-con Jean Valjean in his struggle for redemption and the exploits of his former jailer, the inscrutable Javert. It’s a huge, sprawling story, with massive set pieces and a tremendous cast, the epitome of Broadway spectacle, which is probably why it holds the distinction of being the world’s longest running musical. From a prison cell in Toulon to the (literal) gates of a heavenly paradise, Les Miserables spans an epic amount of terrain, which is handy when you’re charging theatergoers 160 bucks a ticket.

2. Cats – 7,485 performances

The only thing more intense than a musical lover is a cat lover. One hopes that nary shall the two ever meet, but the success of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats proves that there is a huge overlap in those demographics. It’s the silliest show on the list, if you can believe it, but it’s the only musical that even comes close to overthrowing the number one slot. Based on Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a series of poems by T.S. Eliot, Cats is as trippy a show as you’d expect, with a plot that can only be described as robustly nonsensical. Cats sing in coded, hairy tongues, all leading up to “Memories,” the mournful new standard that kills us every time we hear it.

1. The Phantom of the Opera – 9,451 performances

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s other opus, The Phantom of the Opera, came out of Webber’s longing to write a proper romantic story. He had, for some time, been searching for the right material and was having no such luck. That is, until he stumbled across an out of print edition of French writer Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel. With that in hand, Webber knew he had the backbone necessary to create something of lasting significance. And it’s safe to say he succeeded, with Phantom arguably being the most successful creative commercial enterprise of all time. Not bad for a story about disfigured freak kidnapping a girl.

The NoHo Show – Deep Financial Waters

The NoHo Show – Zip Zap Zop

Watch more episodes of the theatrical comedy The NoHo Show

Chris Littler lives in Hollywood. He has a degree in Dramatic Writing from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, one of the most prestigious writing programs in America, which he totally plans to hang on the wall when he has a Study. Chris currently covers video games at UGO.com when he’s not performing improv at iO, and is currently writing a one-hour TV pilot with his friend Wes. Like everyone else you know, he has an album available to purchase on iTunes and has lots of things to say on his blog: chrislittler[dot]com.