NY City's Broadway Beginnings

Musical Performances, America's Capital Entertainment Center

Aug 25, 2008

Tracing the birth of NYC's Broadway, including the "Tin Pan Alley," Ziegfeld, Shubert brothers, and it first performers like Cantor, Jolson and M. Miller.

The term Broadway theater(or theatre) refers to the theatrical performances in the Theater District of the New York City borough of Manhattan. Performances are usually presented in one of the large professional theaters with more than 500 seats. In the US, Broadway is the best form of prefessional theater presented to the general public, and the most lucrative for the performers and anyone involved in the production of the shows.

As with London's West End theatre, New York's Broadway theater is considered the highest level of commercial theater in the English-speaking performing art world.

First Theaters

The birth of the Broadway Theatre or simply Broadway has gone a long way. New York has long been home to the American musical. In the 1810s, the first theaters appeared on Manhattan's Park Row, but popular musical entertainment was primarily confined to inner city neighbourhoods like the Bowery that offered a mix of gospel, blues, minstrelsy, lieder of German beer-hall and Irish ballads, Yiddish music and plenty of accordion and violin.

The Black Crook Musical

However, something changed on the corner of Broadway and Prince in the smarter part of town after the success of The Black Crook at Niblo's Garden in 1866, considered to be the first musical. Also reinforced by the arrival of the European operetta – French, German and Viennese, along with the English comic opera (buffa), the musical gained a new respectability.

Broadway Came Alive

By 1901, venues were alive that advertising executive O.J. Gude called Broadway the "Great White Way," on account of all the electric lights on the advertising hoardings and theatre billboards. Even the New York Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs moved his paper's offices to the area and created Times Square the following year.

Broadway, America's Entertainment Capital

The subway came soon afterwards. Broadway was confirmed in its status as America's entertainment capital. Show business became big business, and from 39th to 45th Street, with theaters, nightclubs and restaurants alive, the area soon became home to song publishers, booking agents, PR companies and trade suppliers.

Tin Pan Alley

The writers of American popular music, worked for sheet music houses whose offices were clustered between West 28th Street and 6th Avenue. The area came to be known as the now-famous "Tin Pan Alley," after journalist Monroe Rosenfeld compared the sound of its countless tinny pianos to the cacophony in a kitchen.

First Broadway Impresarios

By 1907, showmen like Florenz Ziegfeld and brothers Lee and Jacob Shubert reinvented themselves as Broadway's first impresarios. They made creative as well as financial contributions to their shows, and in the process, changed the very nature of American stage performance forever.

Eventually, Ziegfeld and the Shubert brothers also became talent spotters, discovering some of the biggest names in Broadway history, including Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson and Marilyn Miller (real name: Mary Ellen Reynolds), Will Rogers, W.C. Fields and Fanny Brice. Later ones include Rodgers and Hammerstein and Cole Porter.

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