Today we’re wishing everybody a *(jazz-hands)*Happy Broadway Musical Day*(jazz-hands)*! Here’s a brief history a long-standing edifice of American art and culture:

The Broadway Theatre, located at 1681 Broadway in New York City, opened in 1924 as a venue for motion pictures and Vaudeville shows. Though it is the flagship establishment, it is a part of a larger network of venues in Manhattan’s Theatre District, collectively known as Broadway. In total, there are 41 professional theaters in the district, each with 500 or more seats, and still many more smaller satellite venues.

Though the district really began to take off in the roaring twenties, the art of theatre and live performances in America is old as the country itself. In New York, pioneering establishments like Park Theatre (1798) and The Bowery Theatre (1826) paved the way for an emergence of crowd drawing attractions that would eventually take hold in lower midtown Manhattan. Opera and Shakespearian type performances pervaded until the mid 1850’s, when what many consider to be ‘modern musical theater’ began to evolve.

The first long-running musical on Broadway was a 50-show run of “The Elves” in 1857. Though prototypical to what we would think of today as ‘musical’, it was widely acclaimed and helped the district continue to gain momentum until they finally found their true home near Times Square. The art-form would continue to take shape in the decades to follow, with staple shows such as “The Black Crook” (1966).

Since then, New York’s theatre district has been the birthplace of hundreds of productions, and the host of thousands of performances. Some of the most notable include: “The Phantom of the Opera”, “Les Miserables”, “Wicked”, “Cats”, “Mamma Mia”, “Hamilton”, “The Book of Mormon”, and many, many more.

Are you Brave enough to get on stage in front thousands of strangers and sing your heart out? How bout a couple hundred? A few dozen? In the words of the immortal bard: “All the world’s a stage”! No matter what your proclivity toward performance may be, Real Brave can help you find the stage that’s right for you! Each of our three locations has an in-house stage on which we hold regular performances. Sign up for a free lesson today and see where it takes you!