(New York) From Hatea product of the hippie counterculture, Lion King, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary, New York wouldn’t be New York without its musicals. Now, a museum explores this genre in the heart of the cultural lung that is Broadway.
Despite the plethoric museum and cultural offer of the American megalopolis, there was still no place entirely devoted to the history of Broadway and its theaters, which shaped the identity of New York and produced some 30 million dollars. ticketing revenue on average per week.
“The idea is that we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us,” explains theater producer Julie Boardman, co-founder of the museum, which stands on three levels a stone’s throw from Times Square and its giant screens.
The Broadway museum indeed tells some 200 years of history of the genre and reviews more than 500 productions through posters, period costumes, portraits of its former glories or even the reconstructed cafeteria of an old theater. .
Some rooms are dedicated to works that have marked the history of musicals, such as The Phantom of the Opera (which will lower the curtain in New York in February 2023 after 35 years on stage, record longevity), The Lion King, The Wizard of Oz, Rent (inspired by the opera Bohemian by Puccini), Hate Where Showboat.
At the end of the course, “you go behind the scenes” to discover the production of a show and “its different professions”, explains Julie Boardman.
The COVID-19 pandemic, which brought New York to its knees and forced the quarantine of Broadway theaters to close for 18 months, has put the sector under great strain. But for a year, the rooms are filling up again.
Some 270,000 people thronged to one of the 34 shows last week, according to trade organization Broadway League, compared to just under 290,000 at the same time in 2019, the year before the pandemic hit.
And some musicals, like the Phantom of the Opera; MJ the Musical, a biopic about Michael Jackson; Where hamiltonthe enormous success of Lin-Manuel Miranda which revisits the birth of the United States, are sold out.