23 Dramatic Facts About Broadway

In the early 1920s, people began spotting a performer named Olive Thomas at Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theater, where she had previously appeared in Florence Ziegfeld Jr.’s show, “Midnight Frolic.” The sightings were strange for two reasons: Thomas wasn’t scheduled to perform at the venue, and she had passed away in 1920 after an overdose of mercury bichloride. The circumstances of her death remain shrouded in mystery. At the time, her husband, Jack, brother of Hollywood star Mary Pickford, had been taking mercury bichloride to treat syphilis. Some suspected that Jack poisoned his wife, while others thought she may have overdosed intentionally after discovering her husband’s infidelity. Still others believed she had simply confused the blue bottle for one that contained a sleeping medication. Whatever the case, Thomas’s death at just 25 years old shocked the Broadway community, and glimpses of her ghost, often seen with a little blue bottle in hand, were nearly as alarming. The sightings died down when the theater wasn’t getting much business in the mid-20th century, but Thomas has apparently found new ways to make her presence known in the 21st century.

Several years ago, some New Amsterdam Theater employees were discussing the 2011 film “The Artist” when someone wondered aloud what Olive Thomas would have thought of it. Suddenly, more than a dozen DVDs on a nearby table zoomed across the room and crashed into a wall. Dana Mendola, Disney Theatrical Group’s Vice President of Operations, told Playbill that they all sat in stunned silence; that stack had been there for a long time, and there was no obvious way they could have fallen, let alone flown across the room. Mendola was sure Thomas was behind it.

Hi, I’m Erin McCarthy, Editor-in-Chief of Mental Floss, and welcome to the List Show. Broadway boasts a lot more than ghosts, with a flair for the dramatic. From the time Mae West got arrested to the musical that failed spectacularly, this episode is all about weird and wonderful facts from the history of the Great White Way.

Long before Broadway became a hub for entertainers and larger-than-life advertisements, it was largely a Native American thoroughfare known as Wikwa’s Greek Trail. When Dutch settlers took over Manhattan in the 17th century, they renamed the path to Hirstrat, meaning “the gentleman’s street.” Since it was really wide, people sometimes just called it Breidegveg or Broadway. That nickname stuck when the British gained control of the area.

As anyone who’s seen “Hamilton” knows, New York City was the greatest city in the world, even in the 18th century. So it’s no surprise that theater actors picked it as a promising spot to set up shop. Head downtown to Nassau Street around 1750, and you could see “Richard III” performed by Walter Murray and Thomas Keane’s troop. Companies weren’t exactly revolutionizing the theatrical canon; they mainly performed whatever was popular back in England, from Shakespeare’s plays to “The Beggar’s Opera.”

The New York theater scene quieted down considerably while the colonies split from Britain, but things picked back up again in the 1790s. In January 1798, the Park Theater, or New Theater, opened downtown on Park Row with a performance of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” followed by a musical offering called “The Purse” or “American Tar.” Though the theater was technically still unfinished on opening night, it still received a glowing review in New York’s Daily Advertiser, which praised the view of the stage and the distinctness of the actors’ voices.

The Park Theater was also quite large for the time, seating around 2,000 people. It ushered in a new era of bigger, better venues, and other theaters proliferated downtown in the following decades. They were far from what’s now the theater district in Midtown, but some of them were on Broadway. Niblo’s Garden, for example, was a theater on Prince Street and Broadway that played host to what’s often considered the first real Broadway musical. After a fire destroyed the Academy of Music in 1866, producers Harry Palmer and Henry Jarrett were left with nowhere for their ballet company to perform. They convinced the manager of Niblo’s Garden, William Wheatley, to let them combine their dance show with his upcoming play about a sorcerer who trades souls to the devil in return for eternal life. The result was a six-hour-long extravaganza of song, dance, and drama called “The Black Crook.” It was a smashing success, lasting for around 480 performances—hundreds more than a standard run at that point.

Midtown was still in its startup stage. Mayor Cornelius Van Wyck Lawrence had cut the figurative ribbon on 42nd Street in 1836, telling city dwellers to “move uptown and enjoy the pure, clean air.” Broadway’s next big break went by the name of Oscar Hammerstein I. Around the turn of the century, Hammerstein led the charge to transform Times Square into the musical theater mecca we know today, though at that point it was still called Longacre Square. The name only changed after The New York Times moved there in 1904. Hammerstein built multiple theaters in the area, including the Olympia Theater in 1895 and the Victoria Theater in 1899.

In the early years of the 20th century, a whole slew of other theaters started popping up. To name a few, there was the aforementioned New Amsterdam Theater, haunted by Olive Thomas; the Belasco Theater, supposedly haunted by its namesake David Belasco; and the Lyceum Theater, now the oldest continually running Broadway theater in existence.

It wasn’t just Hammerstein’s influence that made Midtown the place to be; two huge industrial advancements helped too. One was electricity. Stuffy gas-lit theaters weren’t just uncomfortable; they were a fire hazard. Electric light bulbs made theatergoing a safer, more pleasant experience. They also gave advertisers a chance to dazzle pedestrians with flashy street displays. Broadway was quick to adopt the bright new bulbs, earning it the nickname “The Great White Way.”

The other big development around that time was the first subway line, which opened in 1904. Suddenly, Times Square didn’t seem so inaccessible to downtowners. Over the next few decades, Broadway saw many French-inspired vaudeville productions and, of course, Florin Ziegfeld Jr.’s famed Ziegfeld Follies. With all the beautiful women clad in scanty costumes, Follies shows were an opportunity for people to see something slightly risqué but still socially acceptable.

However, the moral standard was far from “anything goes.” In February 1927, Mae West and about 20 other actors were arrested while performing a play called “Sex,” written by West herself. The story follows prostitutes in Montreal’s red-light district, and the court described it as an “obscene, indecent, immoral, and impure drama” that would lead to the corruption of the morals of youth. Though the charges would have been dropped had West agreed to shut down “Sex” for good, she refused. As they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. She served her eight days and then founded a prison library with a thousand dollars she earned from a magazine interview.

One noteworthy theory about this particular bit of censorship is that it wasn’t really about the play “Sex” at all. Multiple sources consider the raid more of a warning shot directed towards an upcoming West production called “The Drag,” which would have featured gay men and gay roles. In the words of historian George Chauncey, West had moved the sort of gay acts that had become a part of Times Square’s roof garden reviews and transposed them to the legitimate stage. If “The Drag” was the censor’s true target, they succeeded; the New York production of the play was scuttled.

Around that same time, a Colorado-born actress was preparing to pivot from acting to directing. Her name was Antoinette Perry, or “Tony” for short. You can probably guess where this is going. With her production partner and later lover Brock Pemberton, Perry staged an impressive 17 shows from the late 1920s to early 1940s. She also pushed for a national acting school and helped found the theater wing of Allied Relief, now known as the American Theater Wing. After her death in 1946, the industry honored her by founding the Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theater. When Pemberton presented one at the first ceremony in 1947, he referred to it as a “Tony.” Nobody named Antoinette has ever won a Tony before, but seven Tonys have been awarded, including to people who were billed as Anthony. The latest was in 2018 when Tony Shalhoub took home the Best Leading Actor in a Musical award for his performance in “The Band’s Visit.”

There’s enough Tony trivia to fill its own episode of the List Show, but here’s one fun fact to impress your theater friends: in 1960, “Once Upon a Mattress,” composed by Mary Rogers, nabbed a nomination for Best Musical. She went up against her father, Richard Rogers of Rogers and Hammerstein fame, who had composed “The Sound of Music.” In this case, Dad bested Daughter; “The Sound of Music” tied with “Fiorello!” for the win. During a 1996 interview, Mary said she was just happy to have been nominated. In her words, “I don’t think either my father or I ever thought I’d been nominated for anything.”

In order to be eligible for Tony Awards in the first place, a production has to be on Broadway, as opposed to off-Broadway or even off-off-Broadway. The difference mainly has to do with theater size rather than location. Broadway theaters seat 500 or more patrons, off-Broadway capacity ranges from 100 to 499, and only 99 people or fewer can fit in an off-off-Broadway venue. By definition, Broadway theaters are usually also in or right near the actual theater district, which stretches from West 41st to West 54th Streets in Manhattan, between 6th and 8th Avenues. But there are definitely exceptions to those rules, and the official designation actually comes down to production contracts.

Of the 40 or so Broadway theaters considered “on Broadway” these days, only a few are literally on Broadway: the Palace Theater, the Winter Garden, and the Broadway Theater. A couple of other contenders could be considered “on Broadway” as well, but their official addresses list them on other streets. Broadway tickets are also generally quite a bit more expensive than their off-Broadway counterparts. With a little dedication and a lot of luck, though, you can score deeply discounted tickets to many shows through a lottery system. For that, we have “Rent” to thank. Jonathan Larson’s ’90s rock musical, inspired by the 19th-century opera “La Bohème,” follows a group of modern-day Manhattan bohemians against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic.

To make sure real-life bohemians could actually afford to see the show, producers sold two rows worth of $20 tickets a couple of hours before each performance. The offering was so popular that it became a safety issue, since young people had started spending the night in line outside the theater. The producers replaced the first-come, first-served policy with a lottery. Everyone enters their name in person, and the winners get dibs on the $20 tickets. The new system was so successful that many other theaters with popular shows adopted it too. These days, a lot of these lotteries happen online.

If you’re a tourist with just one shot to see a show, however, you’ll probably forgo the lottery and spring for pricier tickets—maybe to see something classic like “The Phantom of the Opera.” As of March 2020, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical had been performed on the Great White Way 13,370 times, making it the longest-running show in Broadway history. Some of the orchestra members have been there since the beginning. On an episode of “This American Life” from October 2020, Jay Caspian Kang interviewed some of them to find out what it’s like to play the same songs eight times a week for decades. They all have their own coping mechanisms. The French horn players, for example, are the class clowns; one has even been known to write on the bottoms of audience members’ shoes with white-out.

Oboist Melanie Feld told Kang that while she puts her all into the work, it’s not for the audience per se, but to ensure the French horn players don’t laugh at her. Other musicians stay completely disengaged, like Feld’s former nemesis, a trumpet player named Francis Bonny, who is no longer with the show. Bonny actually attached a little blinder to his glasses so he wouldn’t have to see anyone in the pit. Kurt Kobel, who’s clocked in for more than 20 years, doesn’t call himself a violinist; he calls himself a “violin operator.” Kobel told Kang, “I’ve often compared it to working in a hospice. We just keep the show alive as long as we can.”

Nick Jemmo, a trumpet player who joined the production more recently, compared the show to something slightly less bleak: the movie “Groundhog Day.” The list of longest-running shows plays host to another Andrew Lloyd Webber original, “Cats,” which ran from 1981 to 2000 and had a brief revival from 2016 to 2017. It is currently in fourth place. If there were a list of musicals that use the most yak hair, though, I’m almost positive “Cats” would be in the top spot. Over the show’s 18-year tenure, the costume department went through 3,247 pounds of yak hair for the performers’ wigs—that’s around the weight of two fully grown yaks.

When it comes to ticket sales, though, Mungo Jerry and Rumpleteazer got lapped by some much bigger cats, and so did everyone else. “The Lion King” has raked in $1.68 billion since its debut in 1997, making it the highest-grossing Broadway show of all time. Translating “The Lion King” from screen to stage turned out to be a fantastic idea. The same can’t be said for certain other adaptations, like Stephen King’s classic horror novel “Carrie.” The musical arrived on Broadway in the spring of 1988, and everyone was generally appalled at how, well, appalling it was. One especially upbeat number called “Out for Blood,” for example, is all about slaughtering pigs. New York Times critic Frank Rich likened the show to the Hindenburg disaster. “Carrie” crashed and burned nearly as quickly as that ill-fated airship, closing after only five performances.

But blood and guts aren’t always the recipe for a Broadway flop. Take Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” The story traces to a Victorian penny dreadful, a cheap form of popular serialized literature from the 19th century. “Sweeney Todd” centers on a vengeful barber conspiring with an accomplice to bake unsavory characters into savory human meat pies. It premiered on Broadway in March 1979 and went on to win eight Tonys, including Best Musical.

Another big award winner in “Chicago” also has a hefty dose of homicide, and its merry murderesses were based on real people. The model for Roxie Hart was Beulah Annan, who shot her lover in 1924 and then claimed self-defense, explaining that they had both reached for the gun after he assaulted her. Much like Hart’s husband Amos, who sticks by his deceitful wife in the musical, a non-spouse emptied his bank account to pay for her defense. The public felt great sympathy for Annan, whom police described as “Chicago’s prettiest woman slayer,” and she was found not guilty. Velma Kelly was inspired by Bellevue Gartner, a cabaret performer who shot her married lover just weeks before Annan’s alleged crime. Although Gartner was found with blood all over her, she couldn’t remember a thing and pleaded not guilty, explaining to the Chicago Tribune at the time, “No woman can love a man enough to kill him; they aren’t worth it because there are always plenty more.” The jury apparently agreed with that sentiment, enough to acquit her.

Whether you’re watching a show about crime, cats, or a chandelier crashing, there’s a slim chance you’ll be in row I. Many theaters don’t have one; unlike buildings skipping the 13th floor, theaters go right from H to J. This has nothing to do with superstition. At a glance, the letter “I” can easily be mistaken for the number one, which can cause confusion both when box office attendants are selling tickets and when ushers are directing people to their seats in a dark theater. Some theaters omit row K and/or row O since those look so similar too.

Our next episode is going to recount our 20 favorite facts from 20 years of Mental Floss. If you have a favorite fact you’ve learned from the magazine, website, or YouTube channel, leave it in the comments, and I’ll bump one of my own favorite facts to include in the video. We’ll see you then!