Broadway theatre , [ nb 1 ] or Broadway , is a theater genre that consists of the theatrical performances presented in 41 professional theaters , each with or more seats, in the Theater District and Lincoln Center along Broadway , in Midtown Manhattan , New York City.
While the Broadway thoroughfare is eponymous with the district, it is closely identified with Times Square. While exceptions exist, the term "Broadway theatre" is used predominantly to describe venues with seating capacities of at least people. Smaller theaters in New York City are referred to as off-Broadway , regardless of location, while very small venues with fewer than seats are called off-off-Broadway , a term that can also apply to non-commercial, avant-garde , or productions held outside of traditional theater venues.
Both seasons featured theater attendance of approximately Most Broadway shows are musicals. Historian Martin Shefter argues that "Broadway musicals, culminating in the productions of Rodgers and Hammerstein , became enormously influential forms of American popular culture " and contributed to making New York City the cultural capital of the world. New York City's first significant theatre was established in the midth century, around , when actor-managers Walter Murray and Thomas Kean established a resident theatre company at the Theatre on Nassau Street in Lower Manhattan , which held about people.
The company moved to New York in , performing ballad operas and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida. But after the war's end, theatre resumed in , when the 2,seat Park Theatre was built on Chatham Street on present-day Park Row. By the s, P. Barnum was operating an entertainment complex in Lower Manhattan. The 3,seat theatre presented all sorts of musical and non-musical entertainments. In , Palmo's Opera House opened and presented opera for only four seasons before bankruptcy led to its rebranding as a venue for plays under the name Burton's Theatre.
The Astor Opera House opened in A riot broke out in when the lower-class patrons of the Bowery Theatre objected to what they perceived as snobbery by the upper-class audiences at Astor Place: "After the Astor Place Riot of , entertainment in New York City was divided along class lines: opera was chiefly for the upper-middle and upper classes, minstrel shows and melodramas for the middle-class, variety shows in concert saloons for men of the working class and the slumming middle-class.
