Broadway's musicals were built by stars, songwriters, stagehands and at least one rescued dog, and the stories behind them are often as good as the plots. These tiles follow the shows, performers, composers and lyricists, and theaters that shaped the form: a ballet troupe stranded by a fire, a playwright who swore off musicals, a theater hoisted 30 feet into the air and a composer who did not quite reach 100. Where a tale is legend rather than record, the story says so.
Every tile in a Broadway Musicals game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Shows
nine stories
1A burned theater, a stranded ballet and a very long night
On the tile: Black Crook1866
In 1866 a fire destroyed New York's Academy of Music, leaving promoters Henry Jarrett and Harry Palmer with a costly Parisian ballet troupe and nowhere for it to dance. William Wheatley of Niblo's Garden folded the dancers into a melodrama he was about to stage, The Black Crook. Its author objected to the musical numbers until a $1,500 bonus changed his mind. Opening night, September 12, lasted five and a half hours. Clergy attacked the scantily clad chorus, crowds kept coming, and the show ran more than a year. It is often called the first American musical, a debatable title.
The 1943 musical Oklahoma, which began the partnership of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, grew from a play by Lynn Riggs, a Cherokee writer born near Claremore, Oklahoma. His Green Grow the Lilacs opened in New York in 1931 and closed after 64 performances. Riggs modeled its Aunt Eller on his beloved Aunt Mary, and Hammerstein kept many of the play's lines unchanged because they were so well written. The musical tried out in New Haven as Away We Go before taking the name of its rousing title song. Its first Broadway run lasted 2,212 performances.
3A backstage quarrel that became Cole Porter's comeback
On the tile: Kiss Me, Kate1948
Co-producer Arnold Saint Subber got the idea for Kiss Me, Kate by watching Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, a real-life married acting couple, bicker offstage while starring in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. The musical put a feuding divorced couple inside their own company's production of the same play. Its composer, Cole Porter, was in constant pain from a 1937 riding accident, and by 1948 rumors said he was written out. The show opened on December 30, 1948, and in 1949 it won five Tony Awards, including the first ever given for best musical.
4The musical George Bernard Shaw vowed never to allow
On the tile: My Fair Lady1956
After composer Oscar Straus turned Shaw's play Arms and the Man into the 1908 operetta The Chocolate Soldier, George Bernard Shaw declared, "Nothing will ever induce me to allow any other play of mine to be degraded into an operetta or set to any music except its own." In 1921 he told Franz Lehár that a musical Pygmalion was quite out of the question. Only after Shaw died in 1950 did producer Gabriel Pascal persuade the estate to permit one. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe wrote it, and My Fair Lady opened in 1956 and ran 2,717 performances.
In 1949 choreographer Jerome Robbins brought Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents an idea for a modern Romeo and Juliet: a Jewish girl and an Italian Catholic boy on Manhattan's Lower East Side, with the action set around Easter and Passover. The working title was East Side Story. In his copy of Shakespeare's play, Bernstein wrote, "An out and out plea for racial tolerance." The project stalled until 1955, when newspaper headlines about street riots in Los Angeles revived it; the setting moved west, and the feud became a gang war. West Side Story opened on Broadway on September 26, 1957.
6The rock musical that opened a theater, then played a disco
On the tile: Hair1967-1968
On October 17, 1967, Hair became the first production at Joseph Papp's new Public Theater, housed in the old Astor Library, once among New York's first public libraries. After a six-week run, the rock musical moved to the Cheetah, a discotheque at 53rd Street and Broadway, playing on a stage surrounded by the audience that was taken down after each show for dancing. On April 29, 1968, Hair opened at Broadway's Biltmore Theatre with a new director, Tom O'Horgan, and ran 1,750 performances. Its songs, including Aquarius, were recorded by dozens of singers and groups.
In January 1974 dancers Michon Peacock and Tony Stevens gathered a group of Broadway dancers at a Manhattan exercise studio to talk, on tape, about their lives and what it means to be a dancer. They invited director and choreographer Michael Bennett, and a second session followed in February. The dancers signed away the rights to their stories for a dollar each. Bennett shaped the tapes into A Chorus Line, which reached Broadway in July 1975, won the Pulitzer Prize and ran 6,137 performances. Once it was a hit, Bennett gave the dancers a share of his royalties.
8Annie's Sandy was a shelter dog saved just in time
On the tile: Sandy1976-1977
When Annie was being readied at Connecticut's Goodspeed Opera House in 1976, William Berloni, a 19-year-old member of the theater's crew, was offered an acting job and his Equity card if he could find and train a dog to play Sandy. At the Connecticut Humane Society he found a badly abused, sandy-colored stray and was told to take the dog that day or it would be put down the next. The dog followed the show to Broadway, where Annie opened in April 1977. Berloni went on to build a career training rescued animals for the stage.
The crashing chandelier in The Phantom of the Opera echoes a real accident. On May 20, 1896, during a performance at the Paris Opera, a counterweight for the house's great chandelier fell through the ceiling and killed a concierge in the audience. Gaston Leroux later drew on the event for one of the major episodes of his novel The Phantom of the Opera. The musical version opened on Broadway in January 1988 and became the longest-running show in Broadway history. Its chandelier fell for the last time on April 16, 2023, at performance number 13,981.
In 1910 Florenz Ziegfeld hired Bert Williams for the Ziegfeld Follies, and for most of the next decade Williams was one of its biggest stars and the only African American in the cast. Years earlier, with his partner George Walker, he had starred in In Dahomey, a full-length Broadway musical written and performed by African Americans. Though light-skinned, Williams performed in blackface makeup, as the conventions of his era demanded. W. C. Fields called him the funniest man he ever saw, and the saddest.
2The stenographer who held one note for sixteen bars
On the tile: Ethel Merman1930
Ethel Merman was working as a stenographer and singing in nightclubs when she made her Broadway debut in the Gershwins' Girl Crazy in October 1930, in a show whose leading lady was Ginger Rogers. Singing I Got Rhythm, Merman held a single note for sixteen bars, and the audience demanded encores. Backstage, George Gershwin told her never to let anyone give her a singing lesson, because it would ruin her. She never had formal voice training, and by 1959 she had created 13 Broadway roles, in shows including Anything Goes, Annie Get Your Gun and Gypsy.
3The song written for his voice that he did not introduce
On the tile: Paul Robeson1927-1932
Jerome Kern said the melody of Ol' Man River came to him immediately after he first heard Paul Robeson's speaking voice. Yet when Show Boat opened on Broadway in 1927, Jules Bledsoe, not Robeson, originated the role of Joe and the song. Robeson first played Joe in London in 1928, and on Broadway only in the 1932 revival. Edna Ferber, whose novel inspired the show, wrote that after his Ol' Man River she saw a first-night audience shout and cheer as she had never seen an audience behave. He sang it again in the 1936 film.
4The star who shampooed onstage eight times a week
On the tile: Mary Martin1949
For South Pacific, Mary Martin had a notion she had never seen anyone try: actually shampooing her hair while singing a song. Rodgers and Hammerstein built a number around it, I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair, and eight times a week, in front of a paying audience, Martin washed her hair onstage. She won a Tony Award for the role, and she later won two more, for Peter Pan and The Sound of Music. Her son from her first marriage, Larry Hagman, later played J.R. Ewing on the television series Dallas.
5The choir director who became the first Black Tony winner
On the tile: Juanita Hall1949-1950
Juanita Hall trained at the Juilliard School and spent years as a soloist and assistant director of the Hall Johnson Choir before founding a choir of her own. In 1948 Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II heard her sing at an audition for a revue, and they cast her as Bloody Mary in South Pacific, where she sang Bali Ha'i. In 1950 she won the Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical, making her the first Black performer to win a Tony. Rodgers and Hammerstein later chose her to play Madame Liang in Flower Drum Song.
When The King and I opened on March 29, 1951, it starred Gertrude Lawrence, and Yul Brynner was a newcomer billed below the title as a featured player. He won the Tony Award as best featured actor. Over the next 34 years Brynner played the King of Siam more than 4,600 times, on stage, on film and on television, and in time his name stood alone at the top of the poster. His final Broadway performance, on June 30, 1985, was his 4,625th in the role, and the audience stood as the orchestra played Auld Lang Syne.
As a child, Gwen Verdon had legs weakened by illness and wore orthopedic boots, and her mother enrolled her in dance lessons. In 1953 she had the second female lead in Cole Porter's Can-Can, and the show's French star, Lilo, had Verdon's numbers reduced during the out-of-town tryout. On opening night Verdon's dance brought the audience to its feet, chanting her name. She had already left to change costumes, and she had to be fetched back from her dressing room for a curtain call before the show could continue. It won her the first of four Tony Awards.
8The leading man who talked his way through the songs
On the tile: Rex Harrison1956
When Rex Harrison was cast as Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, he was a celebrated leading man who had hardly sung professionally at all. He delivered his songs in a half-spoken style that became known as talk-singing, and it worked. Harrison won the Tony Award for best actor in a musical, and the original cast album, recorded in a single 14-hour session, was the best-selling LP of both 1957 and 1958. He repeated the role in the 1964 film, which won him the Academy Award for best actor.
After Oscar Hammerstein II died, Richard Rodgers wrote both the music and the lyrics for No Strings, which opened on March 15, 1962. Diahann Carroll starred as Barbara Woodruff, a high-fashion model from Harlem who falls in love with an American writer in Paris, and the show was notable for its casual depiction of an interracial romance. Fittingly, Rodgers and orchestrator Ralph Burns arranged the score without any string instruments. Carroll became the first Black woman to win the Tony Award for best actress in a musical.
Eubie Blake, who with lyricist Noble Sissle wrote the score for the 1921 hit Shuffle Along, liked to say he was born on February 7, 1883. So his 100th birthday was celebrated in February 1983, and when he died five days later, obituaries said he was 100. But census, military and Social Security records all give his birth year as 1887, which means he was really 96. Shuffle Along, written, produced and performed by Black artists, ran 504 performances and featured a young Josephine Baker. His headstone still reads 1883.
Irving Berlin, who wrote both the music and the lyrics for Annie Get Your Gun, never learned to read or write music. A self-taught pianist, he preferred playing on the black keys, which correspond to the key of F-sharp. To play in other keys, he had piano makers build transposing pianos: a lever under the keyboard let it slide left or right, so the same hand position could sound any key. He owned at least three. One, built around 1955 by Sohmer & Co. of New York, was later donated to the Great American Songbook Foundation.
Of Thee I Sing, a 1931 satire about a presidential candidate whose party runs on a platform of love, became the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The 1932 prize went to lyricist Ira Gershwin and book writers George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, but not to composer George Gershwin. His contribution was music, not words, and the prize was considered a literary honor. The Pulitzers had no music category until 1943, six years after his death. In 1998, the centennial of his birth, George Gershwin finally received a special citation.
Lew Fields, a vaudeville star turned Broadway producer, warned his children away from theater careers. His daughter Dorothy became a lyricist anyway, writing the words to On the Sunny Side of the Street and the Oscar-winning The Way You Look Tonight. Late in World War II, she brought Oscar Hammerstein II an idea for a musical about the sharpshooter Annie Oakley, to star Ethel Merman. Jerome Kern was to write the music, but he died in 1945 before work began, and Irving Berlin took over. Dorothy and her brother Herbert wrote the book of Annie Get Your Gun, which opened in 1946.
In March 1933 Kurt Weill, composer of The Threepenny Opera, fled Nazi Germany for Paris, and soon his works fell victim to the Nazi book burnings. In September 1935 he sailed for New York with his wife, the singer Lotte Lenya, to work on a stage production, and he stayed. He applied for citizenship in 1937 and became an American in 1943, the year his musical One Touch of Venus opened. His 1947 musical Street Scene, with lyrics by the poet Langston Hughes, won him a Tony Award at the very first Tony ceremony.
6The first person to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony
On the tile: Rodgers1962
Long before anyone spoke of an EGOT, Richard Rodgers completed the set. He won an Academy Award for It Might as Well Be Spring, from the film State Fair, Tony Awards for South Pacific and a Grammy for the cast album of The Sound of Music. In 1962 an Emmy for his music for the television documentary series Winston Churchill: The Valiant Years made him the first person to win all four. He also shared a Pulitzer Prize for South Pacific with Oscar Hammerstein II and director Joshua Logan. Composer Marvin Hamlisch later matched all five.
7The writing team that wrote themselves into their first hit
On the tile: Comden & Green1938-1944
In 1938 Betty Comden and Adolph Green joined other young performers in a comedy troupe called the Revuers, based at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village. Its members included a young Judy Holliday, then named Judy Tuvim, and Leonard Bernstein played piano. In 1944 Bernstein's ballet music for Fancy Free grew into the musical On the Town, and Comden and Green wrote its book and lyrics, with substantial parts for themselves. Their partnership lasted six decades and produced Wonderful Town, Bells Are Ringing and the film Singin' in the Rain.
Before he wrote a Broadway show, Meredith Willson of Mason City, Iowa, played flute and piccolo in John Philip Sousa's band from 1921 to 1924, then spent five years in the New York Philharmonic under conductors including Arturo Toscanini. He went on to a career in radio. His first musical, The Music Man, drew on memories of his small Iowa hometown and took about five years, more than 40 drafts and rewrites that continued until the afternoon of its Broadway opening on December 19, 1957. It beat West Side Story for the Tony Award for best musical.
When New York magazine published its first issue in April 1968, it included a cryptic crossword by Stephen Sondheim, the lyricist of West Side Story. His love of puzzles went back to about age 14, when his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, introduced him to Puns and Anagrams crosswords. Sondheim modeled his puzzles on Britain's demanding Listener crosswords, wanting a test of wits rather than of obscure knowledge. His puzzles for the magazine, which ran for about a year and a half, helped popularize cryptic crosswords in the United States. He stopped when he got too busy writing Company.
1The cigar inventor who built a palace in Longacre Square
On the tile: Olympia1895
Oscar Hammerstein I arrived in New York in 1864 as a teenager and started out sweeping floors in a cigar factory. He went on to patent cigar-making machines and publish the U.S. Tobacco Journal, then poured his fortune into theaters. On November 25, 1895, he opened the Olympia in Longacre Square, a complex with a music hall, a concert hall, a theater and a roof garden, and crowds mobbed the opening. Nine years later Longacre Square was renamed Times Square. Hammerstein died nearly broke in 1919, but his grandson, Oscar Hammerstein II, would help create Oklahoma and South Pacific.
2The Broadway theater that began as a horse market
On the tile: Winter Garden1896-1911
The Winter Garden Theatre began life in 1896 as the American Horse Exchange, built when Longacre Square was the center of New York's horse and carriage trade. By 1911 automobiles were replacing horses, and the Shubert brothers leased the building. Architect William Albert Swasey turned its show ring into an auditorium. The theater opened on March 20, 1911, with La Belle Paree, featuring Al Jolson in his Broadway debut. Later tenants included West Side Story and Cats, which ran there for eighteen years.
When producer Daniel Frohman built the Lyceum Theatre in 1903, he included an apartment for himself upstairs, with a small door that offered a bird's-eye view of the stage below. The story goes that Frohman waved a white handkerchief through it to tell his wife, the actress Margaret Illington, that she was overacting. The tale is legend, but the little door is real, and Frohman's old apartment now houses the Shubert Archive. The Lyceum, with its gray limestone facade and six Corinthian columns, still presents Broadway shows.
The Palace Theatre opened in 1913, built by vaudeville entrepreneur Martin Beck, and Judy Garland later played there. In 2022, to free its ground floor for shops in a new Times Square tower, engineers did something remarkable. Beginning on January 7, they raised the landmark auditorium, some 14 million pounds of it, 30 feet into the air on 34 hydraulic lifting posts, finishing that spring. After a $50 million restoration, the theater now sits on the third floor of the 46-story TSX Broadway building.
Vincent Sardi and his wife, Eugenia, opened a small restaurant on West 44th Street in 1921 and moved to their current home on the same street in 1927. Sardi struck a deal with Alex Gard, a Russian artist: Gard would draw caricatures of the famous people who came in, and in return he would get his meals. Their agreement said Sardi could not complain about the drawings, and Gard could not complain about the food. Gard drew more than 700 of the caricatures on the walls, and other artists carried on the tradition after his death.
6The first Tony winners got money clips, not medallions
On the tile: Tony Awards1947-1949
The Tony Awards are named for Antoinette Perry, an actress, director and producer who led the American Theatre Wing during World War II and died in June 1946. The first ceremony was held on Easter Sunday, April 6, 1947, at a dinner in the Waldorf Astoria's Grand Ballroom. There was no trophy yet. Winners received scrolls, along with gold money clips or cigarette lighters for the men and compacts or bracelets for the women. The familiar medallion, with the masks of comedy and tragedy, was designed by Herman Rosse and introduced in 1949.
7A borrowed dressing gown became an opening-night charm
On the tile: Legacy Robe1950
In 1950 Bill Bradley, a chorus member in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, got a dressing gown from fellow performer Florence Baum and sent it to his friend Arthur Partington for the opening of Call Me Madam. Partington added a rose from Ethel Merman's costume and passed it to a performer in Guys and Dolls. The custom stuck. On a musical's opening night, the robe goes to the chorus member with the most Broadway credits, who circles the stage three times while castmates touch it for luck. Each show adds a patch. In 2018 it was renamed the Legacy Robe.
On June 25, 1973, the Theatre Development Fund opened a booth in Duffy Square, at 47th Street and Broadway, to sell discount tickets to the same day's shows. Its architects had been asked to design a temporary structure around a trailer for $5,000. They topped it with pipes and canvas sails and gave it a name: TKTS. In 2008 a new booth opened beneath a staircase of red glass steps. In its first 50 years, TKTS accounted for 68.6 million admissions to Broadway and Off-Broadway shows.
Theater people have long warned against whistling backstage, and the usual explanation is practical. From at least the 1600s, prompters used whistles and bells to cue scene changes, and old promptbooks mark whistle cues with a W. The story goes that many stagehands were sailors and dockworkers hired during the slow winter shipping season, who brought their rope skills and whistle signals with them. A stray whistle from an actor could set off a scene change at the wrong moment. Cue lights and intercoms replaced whistles long ago, but the superstition lives on.