In the 2017–18 theater season, 63 percent of the 13.8 million tickets sold to performances of Broadway shows were bought by tourists who live outside New York City and its suburbs. No other American city can make a comparable claim. Despite the high quality of theater elsewhere in the U.S., New York remains America's only “destination city” for live theater, as has been the case since the 1920s, when Times Square became its theater district. Of the shows that out-of-towners go to see, musicals make up 83 percent. Indeed, Broadway and musical comedy are for most people one and the same thing. Yet despite the diminished place of the stage play in Broadway's latter-day economy, it is also true that an American play must sooner or later be produced there for it to be generally acknowledged as significant.
When and how did America discover Broadway? Laurence Maslon, a professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, tells part of the story in Broadway to Main Street: How Show Tunes Enchanted America, a fully sourced, engagingly written study that is a model of its kind.1 It is as fine a book as could possibly be written about the way in which the Broadway musicals of the 20th century have come to be woven into our cultural fabric.
The story begins in 1891, when Charles Hoyt and Percy Gaunt wrote a musical comedy called A Trip to Chinatown that ran in New York for two years, a record that would not be broken until 1919. Freely based on an 1842 farce by the Viennese playwright Johann Nestroy, it was so successful that several road companies performed the show throughout America simultaneous with its New York run.2
A year after A Trip to Chinatown opened, T.B. Harms, one of the first companies to publish musical-comedy scores, brought out a folio of songs from the show. Around the same time, a singer in one of the road companies interpolated into the production a sentimental waltz by Charles K. Harris called “After the Ball.” This song soon became even more popular than the show in which it was performed, ultimately selling 5 million sheet-music copies. Each one bore on its cover a prominent note identifying the song as having been sung “in Hoyt's ‘A Trip to Chinatown,'” a form of advertising that became standard practice for sheet-music editions of songs drawn from the scores of hit shows. It was from ads like these that ordinary Americans first learned that New York was the center of theatrical activity in the U.S.
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