The 30th anniversary of The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway (Photo by Jeremy Daniel)

By celebrating its 30th anniversary on Broadway last week, The Phantom of the Opera marked what now seems a never-ending series of milestones, having run longer than any show in Broadway history.

The seeming permanence of Phantom may mask its achievement, though it has an eight-year lead on the revival of Chicago and nine years on The Lion King. Even if it were to close tomorrow – and that’s not about to happen – it would take the better part of a decade before either of those surpassed it, if they could.

Congratulations are due, of course, to Andrew Lloyd Webber, but also to Richard Stilgoe, Charles Hart, Harold Prince, Gillian Lynne, Cameron Mackintosh and so many others.

There is a certain irony to Phantom’s stupendous run on Broadway, in the West End and around the world – as pointed out in Harold Prince’s autobiography Contradictions, recently revised and expanded as Sense of Occasion.

In the original 1974 book, Prince predicted that no show would ever run as long as Fiddler on the Roof, which he produced. In Sense of Occasion, he allows that he was wrong, with many shows having surpassed Fiddler – A Chorus Line, Rent, Les Misérables, Wicked and the aforementioned productions to name a few.

Last summer, Prince was quick to contradict a question I asked him about whether shows were being engineered for longer runs. He cited the international market for musicals, and for tourism, as the engine behind the longest-running shows.

What was happening wasn’t a creative decision, but rather a product of changing and expanding opportunities. Shows were running longer because ever more people wanted to see them, the new modes of marketing and because there were successive generations of new audiences.

Certainly long-running shows existed before Phantom and its brethren, but they weren’t in theatres as large, they didn’t play in as many cities, and they didn’t necessarily tour as extensively.

In the West End, The Mousetrap has run for longer, but it is a play, not a musical. In Paris, a revival of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano has been running at the tiny Theatre de la Huchette for some 60 years. In the late 1980s, I saw a production of The Three Sisters at Moscow Art Theatre that had been in the repertory since the 1940s. It may yet still be there for all I know. The Fantasticks ran for 42 years Off-Broadway at the Sullivan Street Playhouse.

Coming back to Broadway, the expanding list of long runs is something to marvel at, especially if you are among the fortunate who invested in the shows.

But just as the growing markets, according to Prince, expanded the sense of what a Broadway show could achieve, they have also fundamentally changed Broadway itself. I have heard more than a few people remark that they have been in the Majestic Theatre, home to Phantom, only once – or not at all – in their lifetimes.

That is obviously due to the Majestic having had only one show playing for 30 years; the previous tenant, 42nd Street, ran for six years before that.

I should note that Phantom has been around long enough that I saw it on a discounted student ticket. (Though it opened a while after I graduated from university, the friend who bought the seats was only six months past graduation.)

It is possible to applaud Phantom, Chicago and The Lion King and all of those who have made them possible and bask in their success, but also temper that appreciation with caution.

While only a handful of shows each decade will even approach Phantom’s phenomenal run – Hamilton seems poised to be the latest to join that esteemed pantheon – and maybe some will run for only a decade, the impact has already fundamentally changed Broadway.

With a finite number of theatres, hovering at about 40 despite the openings and closings, these hits end up restricting the opportunities for new Broadway work. It’s great news for theatre owners, but limiting for works that might truly benefit from the awareness and opportunity that Broadway affords as a result of its legacy.

Unlike some countries, where we read about purpose-built theatres for each new extravaganza, Manhattan affords little space for new venues, especially in the theatre district.

The Shubert Organization announced, not so long ago, that it would not pursue a new theatre in the area because the costs were prohibitive. Meanwhile, the new venues coming to Manhattan are performing arts centres, designed to house a variety of work.

Only if works can set up in other cities with populations and tourism that approach those of New York, and only if the media affords comparable attention to that devoted to Broadway, might we see an expansion of large-scale work.

Perhaps Chicago, Boston, Washington DC and Philadelphia, to name but four, could become home to long-term work that doesn’t need to play Broadway to ultimately reach vast audiences.

We must accept that the model has changed, as Prince noted, and so change the opportunities for production accordingly. Even leaving aside significant concerns about pricing and accessibility, Broadway’s own success may be limiting new Broadway-scale work.

Andy Huntington Jones in Cats (Photo by Matthew Murphy)

In hindsight, the slogan ‘now and forever’ looks a bit less like marketing and a bit more like hubris. While it didn’t run forever, on the U.S. side of the Atlantic, the musical Cats maintains a formidable place in the annals of longest-running Broadway shows, surpassed only by The Lion King, the revival of Chicago and The Phantom of the Opera. While those latter three shows are all still chugging along, meaning they’re widening their lead over Cats, it’s going to take another four years or so before Wicked takes over the number four slot on the list – though that looks to be an increasingly likely achievement.

When the revival of Cats opens on Broadway on Sunday, in an open-ended run (in contrast to its recent limited-run engagements in the West End), it finds itself in a very different marketplace to the Broadway of the early 1980s, one that it helped to create through its success. The 1980s were a period when Broadway was in a slump, with theatres being demolished to make way for more lucrative real estate, and one even sold to a church. Now, musicals that run for fewer than five years can in some cases be seen as disappointments; 10-year runs are increasingly commonplace, if not exactly run of the mill.

The arrival of Cats, riding on a crest of acclaim from London back in 1982, was a big cultural event. Tickets for it in its first years were as dear as Hamilton tickets today, even if the secondary market was invisible to the average theatregoer in those pre-internet days. It’s important to remember how celebrated Cats was in its day, because as its 18 year run wore on, the show began to be perceived as a bit less groundbreaking and perhaps somewhat timeworn. For all of its enormous commercial success, its penetration into the popular consciousness and successful tapping of both the family and tourist markets, its then unprecedented run ultimately yielded jokes about the show having outlived its nine lives. The parade of animals that opened Julie Taymor’s production of The Lion King for Disney became the new standard for anthropomorphised animals on Broadway; the two shows overlapped for almost three years in New York.

While Chicago returned to Broadway in a production that echoed the Bob Fosse-directed original, it isn’t the same staging; no doubt the show benefited from a hiatus of some 20 years. Conversely, Les Misérables came back to Broadway for the first time only three years after the original run closed, in the same production, and lasted just 15 months. The Cats revival has the benefit of being gone from Broadway for almost 16 years, but it’s largely the same show (save for some new choreography and lighting). It remains to be seen whether ticket buyers embrace the show that may well have been their very first time at the theatre, seizing an opportunity to take their children to an experience they once loved as children, or whether the iconic production might have needed a full rethink for the digital era, for a generation raised on The Lion King and Wicked.

I have to confess that I am rather uniquely unqualified to hazard a guess as to what the fate of the Cats revival may be. Why? Are you sitting down? Because I’ve never seen it. Despite avid theatregoing that began in the late 1970s, I never did manage to see Cats on Broadway, on tour or even in a high school auditorium. I was already a collegiate theatre snob when the show opened, and, without children of my own nagging me to take them as the run continued, I never felt the feline lure of T.S. Eliot or Andrew Lloyd Webber during the ensuing two decades. When I worked on the US premiere of By Jeeves in the mid-1990s, I always feared Lloyd Webber turning to me and saying, “Do you remember that moment in Cats when…?” I would have been left sputtering for a response.

That’s not to say I don’t have a strong impression of the show, since numbers were performed in full on television back in the day, excerpted for Broadway histories and television ads alike, parodied frequently, and so on. The TV sitcom Caroline in the City featured an actor character who was – fictionally – a member of the Cats menagerie. It was such a cultural touchstone that I remember The New York Times critic Frank Rich panning a show I did press for, about illegal dog fighting (no animals were harmed), with a withering, “Anyone for Cats?”

Come next week at this time, I will no longer be a Cats virgin. Whatever I make of it, inevitably my response cannot be one of youthful wonder nor middle-aged nostalgia. The question for the producers is whether there are enough people out there who want to evoke one or the other of those sentiments, among the already initiated or those born too late to experience the original run. As much as I plan to watch the show at long last, I’ll be keeping an eye on the audience as well, to see who turns out for the reconstituted Cats, if not now and forever, than at least once and again.

Empty display cases at the Longacre Theatre (Photo by Howard Sherman)

The fact that Nerds, a musical about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs which has been in development for a decade, cancelled its Broadway run less than a month before its first preview, shouldn’t be entirely shocking. After all, the marquee of the Longacre Theatre, where it was to begin performances, still carried the logo for Allegiance, the musical that closed there in February. At 5 pm on March 8, the day of the announced cancellation, the lighted display cases on the front of the building were empty and dark.

By the same token, the box office lobby was crammed full of equipment boxes for the show’s load-in. The cast was already in rehearsal. Presumably there was a nearly finished set somewhere, costumes on racks, and so on.

What happened to Nerds seems to happen every so often, but it’s one of the lesser discussed examples of a show going awry on Broadway. It doesn’t have the ignominy of closing immediately after its opening night (like the musical Glory Days) or the gossip page-worthiness of shutting down in previews (like the Farrah Fawcett vehicle Bobbi Boland). It’s not a case of a show that announced plans to happen, but never really came together, like Pump Boys and Dinettes did two years ago.

It’s not a saga like the cursed, headline-making musical Rebecca, twice underway and twice cancelled, with a con artist posing as the representative of a fictional investor behind its undoing. Because Nerds never began performances, it will never enter any of the history books or databases that would preserve its brush with Broadway.

Nerds was simply a lower profile show that, like a number before it, couldn’t survive the withdrawal of a key investor late in the game – or at least it stated that was the reason. The same thing happened to a revival of Godspell in 2008, although that one managed to get on three years later, with much of the same creative team and even a few of the same cast, albeit under the aegis of a different producer. But that’s more the exception.

The fate of Nerds is a reminder that for all of the bullish words about Broadway’s health – highest attendance! highest revenue! – many of the shows that get there may be doing so while playing a game of brinksmanship, racing the clock to get in the entire capitalisation by the legally mandated deadline. After all, if shows feature 10, 15, even 20 producers above the title, how many individual investors stand behind them, to make up budgets that can now be $4 million for a play, and in some cases four times that for a musical?

With Nerds, there are people who have suddenly been put out of work with no warning, there are people on the hook for expenses for a show that had its last full performance for a small invited audience on Wednesday in its rehearsal hall, there are creators whose dreams have been dashed. Nerds may quickly fade from the memories of the relatively few who were familiar with it, and it joins a list of other shows to meet the same fate. But it’s also an important reminder – in the era of juggernauts from The Phantom of The Opera and The Lion King to The Book of Mormon and Hamilton – of how many pieces have to come together to make a show a success, and just how fragile a new production can be.