Historically, one of the major drivers of tourism in New York City has been entertainment - many visitors from both the US and abroad head to the city hoping to catch a show, either on Broadway or at one of the many, increasingly popular, 'off-Broadway' venues.
The Broadway show has a long and distinguished history. The street, with its central position in Manhattan, has been a focus for entertainment for two centuries. Theater first began to make its mark on the area in a big way in the middle of the nineteenth century. Then, as now, the emphasis on Broadway was as much on mass entertainment as high art, and for many years the most popular shows were vaudeville 'variety' entertainments, offering a mix of song, dance, and comedy with no real coherent, overarching plot.
Popular musical theater began to take off towards the end of that century, as the light operettas of European composers such as Franz Lehar were imported for the entertainment of New York's growing middle class. The golden age of Broadway musical theater was the period between the 1920s and the 1960s - or, if you want to put it in terms of actual shows, roughly between Jerome Kern's Showboat and Rodgers and Hammersteins' The Sound of Music.
Although comedy has always been the dominant form of musical theater - most particularly in the great shows of Cole Porter or George Gershwin - Broadway musicals have often led the way in political satire and consciousness-raising. Kern's Showboat and Gershwin's Porgy and Bess deal with racism in American society; Gershwin's Strike Up The Band! is a satire on jingoistic militarism and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story examines the problems of disaffected youth in NYC itself. Possibly one of the reasons for this liberal political slant is the background of many of the composers: George Gershwin (born Jacob Gershowitz), Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin (born Israel Balin), Lorenz Hart and Jerome Kern were all the children of Jewish immigrants. These families fled from Russia and eastern Europe around the turn of the twentieth century to escape tsarist persecution, bringing with them a rich musical tradition and a strong sympathy for the oppressed and dispossessed, which they passed on to their children.
After a couple of decades in the seventies and eighties of living off more-or-less shallow European imports - shows like Cats, Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables - the conscience of Broadway, kept alive by homegrown talents such as Stephen Sondheim, is beginning to reassert itself. Shows like Wicked and Avenue Q have been restoring the great thoroughfare's reputation as an area where slick entertainment and edgy and controversial drama can thrive side by side.
Wicked: The Grimmerie, a Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Hit Broadway Musical
Broadway Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time
Broadway Barks: With CD
The Playbill Broadway Yearbook: June 2007 to May 2008: Fourth Annual Edition (Playbill Broadway Yearbook)
On Broadway Theater Posters 2009 Wall Calendar