Everything on the site, in one list

Sixteen pieces across six sections. This is the dense version; the section pages carry the same material with room around it.

Piece	What it covers	Length
LONDONShaftesbury Avenue is a business model, not a street
The same show is two businesses on two streets	A West End run and a Broadway run of the same title have different capitalisation, different weekly costs and different definitions of success. The show does not change; the arithmetic does.	long
Nearly every house sits in one of two small grids	London’s theatre district is walkable in twenty minutes and New York’s is smaller still. Concentration is the whole industry’s operating condition.	medium
A London run is sold to people who do not live there	The West End’s audience is substantially visiting, which changes what can run for years and what closes in months.	medium
HOUSESA house that held one show for nineteen years
One house, one show, three decades	Her Majesty’s held The Phantom of the Opera for decades and the building was adapted around it. A long run stops being a booking and becomes tenancy.	long
The Winter Garden rebuilt its roof for a cat	Cats ran eighteen years in New York and the theatre was structurally altered to stage it. The alteration outlived the show.	medium
Moving a show across an ocean rebuilds it	A transfer is not a tour: the set is remade to a different stage, the orchestra is recontracted, and the cast is usually local.	medium
OLIVIERThe prizes decide what tours
An Olivier moves more tickets than a review	Awards function as certification for an audience that cannot judge in advance. The measurable effect is on the tour, not the West End run.	medium
A Tony depends on which building you opened in	Eligibility is defined by the theatres themselves — a fixed list of Broadway houses. Open next door and the same production is not eligible.	medium
NEW YORKBroadway is forty-one rooms and a union rulebook
Broadway is a list of buildings, not a place	The designation is contractual. Forty-one theatres qualify, most of them clustered in a few blocks, and everything from union agreements to award eligibility follows from that list.	long
Every week’s takings are published	The Broadway League reports weekly grosses, which makes it the most transparent commercial theatre in the world and the most brutally comparable.	medium
The show that opens is not the show that started previews	Previews are paid rehearsal in front of an audience. Numbers are cut, orders changed and endings rewritten while tickets are being sold.	medium
THE PITThe band you cannot see is the one being cut
The composer writes the tune, somebody else writes the sound	Orchestration is a separate credit and a separate craft: Jonathan Tunick’s work on Sondheim is as identifiable as the songs it dresses.	long
The band shrinks every decade and the contract says so	Minimum musician counts are negotiated per house and per city, and the long argument over synthesisers and tracks is an employment dispute as much as an artistic one.	medium
There is a number that has to land near the end	The eleven o’clock number exists because audiences used to arrive at eight-thirty and the show needed a last surge before the curtain.	short
THE RECORDThe cast album is not what happened on stage
The album quietly fixes what the stage could not	A cast recording is made in a studio in a day or two, out of order, with edits and retakes. It preserves the show and improves it at the same time.	long
The record is shorter than the show and someone chose	Running time forces omissions — reprises, dance breaks, dialogue underscoring — and those choices shape how the show is remembered.	medium