About

Musical Online covers musical theatre as a working industry, in London and New York.

The two cities set the terms for the form, and they do it differently. A West End house can carry a title for twenty years on an audience that renews itself month by month; a Broadway house reports its gross every Monday and is judged on it in public. That single difference runs through everything here — which buildings get built and rebuilt, how large a band a producer can afford, which prizes are worth chasing, and what survives on the recording after the run has ended.

The site is organised in six sections: London, the houses, the prizes, New York, the pit and the record. Every piece is about something you could go and look up: a named building, a named contract, a named craft. The archive lists all of it in one place.

We write about history, structure and record. A show’s first night, the shape of its second act, the terms of the lease it plays under and the album made from it are all fair subjects.