Our Comprehensive Guide to Broadway’s Best

While there is a considerable amount of spam surrounding the hot keyword “Broadway” out there in the Internet ether, we wanted to provide a comprehensive overview of what the industry has to offer. Read through or skip ahead to find information on the most popular shows, what Broadway was like way back when, and what the critics have to say about what you should be seeing!

Top Broadway Musicals
Broadway History
Broadway Reviews

Top Broadway Musicals

We’ve based our list of the top 10 musicals currently running on Broadway on highest average ticket prices of the past year. These aren’t the prices everyone is paying to see Simba ascend Pride Rock, or watch Elphaba transcend common prejudices, but they’re what people have historically been willing to dish out – because with these shows, the price tag fits the goods.

Scroll below for info on individual shows and ticket links!

1). The Lion King

Highest Avg. Ticket Price: $483
Based on the Disney movie of the same name – itself a loose retelling of Hamlet – King in fact follows the lion prince Simba as he overcomes a traumatic childhood event, and, with a little help from a philosophical meerkat and warthog, matures into the hero his kingdom needs.

2). The Book of Mormon

Highest Avg. Ticket Price: $443
A smash hit from the writers of “South Park,” The Book of Mormon is both foul-mouthed (see: the Ugandan warlord’s unprintable name) and tender-hearted (see: “Tomorrow is a Latter Day”). Two bright-eyed American missionaries set off to convert the heathens of Uganda, only to realize zeal and a belief in your own infallibility may not be enough to conquer the harsh realities of AIDs and poverty. They also learn a thing or two about themselves along the way, making this show an uplifting treat that skips the treacle.

3). Phantom of the Opera

Highest Avg. Ticket Price: $247
Another adaption (of the novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra by Gaston Leroux), Andrew Lloyd Webber’s classic romance tells the tale of sweet, if incorrigibly naive, Christine, her would-be lover Raoul, and the tragic “phantom” mad with insecurity and genius between them. Phantom has enjoyed a Broadway run of almost 25 years, making it the longest, and among the most beloved, shows in history.

4). War Horse

Highest Avg. Ticket Price: $222
This British import focuses on the bond between a young man and his horse, its central themes of devotion and friendship dramatized by tour-de-force special effects. Set against the backdrop of World War I, Albert’s horse Joey is shipped off to France to serve in the calvary. While Joey adapts to army life abroad, Albert, unable to forget his friend, determines to set out and bring him home once and for all.

5). Wicked

Highest Avg. Ticket Price: $191
Our next novel-to-stage adaption is one of Broadway’s great success stories. Wicked, based on Gregory Maguire’s book of the same name, is the untold story of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, she of L. Frank Baum’s (or Louis B. Mayer’s, depending on your cultural reference point) Wizard of Oz fame. The tagline could very well be “evil is as evil does,” as Elphaba’s encounters with the denizens of Oz, including Glenda the Good Witch and The Great and Powerful Oz himself, prove she may not be as wicked as “history” would have us believe.

6). Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

Highest Avg. Ticket Price: $171
Bono, the rock superstar behind the soundtrack to this highly ambitious and staggeringly high-cost musical, has admitted Spider-Man is difficult to categorize, but “pop-up, pop-art opera” comes close. The show with a checkered production history doesn’t deviate much from the comic book’s origins plot, but it’s the special effects – the aerial stunts, the projection screens, the moving sets – which are its real draw.

7). Mamma Mia!

Highest Avg. Ticket Price: $144
Greece, ABBA, and a healthy dose of paternity confusion: Mamma Mia! follows Sophie as she plans her wedding and tries to determine which of her mother’s three former suitors is her biological father. Set to the tune of the Swedish band’s smash hits, including the titular number and “Dancing Queen,” Mamma Mia!’s more recent Broadway resurgence owes a great deal to the 2008 Meryl Street film adaptation, which enjoyed popular rather than critical success.

8). Avenue Q

Highest Avg. Ticket Price: $136
The puppets of this “coming of age” parable aren’t your typical Sesame Street fare. Protagonist Princeton moves to the titular street after graduating from college with his seemingly useless English degree. Once settled, his puppet neighbors teach him lessons about life, tolerance, and the particular uses of the Internet. Despite its cuddly-looking cast, this show is not for kids – just adults looking to laugh about the very real anxieties of growing up.

9). Jersey Boys

Highest Avg. Ticket Price: $132
A Broadway musical seems the perfect fit for the showbiz tale of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. The popular ’60s and ’70s rock band is the focus of the semi-biographical Jersey Boys, which chronicles the rise and eventual breakup of Jersey’s finest (before the advent of Springsteen, that is). With one of the more recognizable, and singable, scores of the bunch, Boys is a testament to Broadway’s feel-good allure.

10). Once

Highest Avg. Ticket Price: $130
With the surprise 2006 hit film as its inspiration, Once is not a grand love story, but a quietly moving one. Set in Dublin, two unnamed protagonists – referred to as simply “Guy” and “Girl” in the program – perform music, fall in love and struggle to connect, several broad phrases that do or say little for the play’s subtleties. It’s no fairytale, but Once may be the most romantic work to spring from The Great White Way this year.

Broadway History

Textbook History

The history of the former “Wickquasgeck Trail” or “Breedeweg” Street can be traced through the people who settled, lived, profited, and helped establish a nation there. Modern Broadway began as a Native American trail that ran the length of Manhattan. When the Dutch settled New Amsterdam (modern-day New York), they appropriated the trail, along with everything else, and named it either “Heere Straat” or “Breedweg.” British colonization succeeded Dutch rule, and with it came a successive re-christening: to the stately Great George’s Street. By the time the 19th century drew its considerably sooty if increasingly modern curtains to a close, Great George’s Street had been swallowed up in the whole of “Breedweg” – now the Anglicized “Broadway” –, which had also grown to encompass the nearby Boulevard and Bloomingdale roads.

Showbiz History

The early 20th century was an important time for the development of New York’s theater scene, a downtown hub with upwardly mobile aspirations. A migrant collection of theaters often moving in pursuit of cheap rents – from downtown to Union Square to Madison Square – it took until after WWI for the industry to coalesce into its modern configuration of bright lights, broad ads, along Broadway in Times Square.

Prior to Broadway’s establishment as The Great White Way, theater in New York was characterized by the bizarre and the affecting – not so different from our modern medium. One of the first great success stories was 1866’s The Black Crook, which ran for an unprecedented five and a half hours (just an hour and a half shy of Bruce Springsteen’s current European sets). Next, the vaudeville epoch, musical comedy, operettas, jazz-baby flapper-bait concoctions such as Lady Be Good and No, No Nanette, and then the early pinnacle: Showboat, the 1927 hit that most resembles Broadway productions today.

New York theater arguably became a force to rival London’s West End with the arrival of playwright Eugene O’Neill in the late ’20s and ’30s. In 1947 Broadway solidified its newfound prestige with the first annual Tony Awards, a make-or-break ceremony for the best and brassiest in live theatrical entertainment.

Broadway Reviews

The Lion King

The New York Times review

The Book of Mormon

The Washington Post review
LA Times Review review

Phantom of the Opera

Roger Ebert review

War Horse

TIME Magazine review
NY Times review

Wicked

New Yorker review

Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark

NY Times review

Mamma Mia!

New York Magazine review
Theatermania review

Avenue Q

NY Times review

Jersey Boys

USA Today review
NY Times review

Once

LA Times review
Chicago Tribune review
NY Times review