- published: 22 Nov 2012
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Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City. Along with London's West End theatre, Broadway theatre is widely considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world.
The Broadway theatre district is a popular tourist attraction in New York. According to The Broadway League, Broadway shows sold approximately $1.081 billion worth of tickets in calendar year 2011, compared with $1.037 billion for 2010. Attendance in 2011 was 12.13 million.
New York did not have a significant theatre presence until about 1750, when actor-managers Walter Murray and Thomas Kean established a resident theatre company at the Theatre on Nassau Street, which held about 280 people. They presented Shakespeare plays and ballad operas such as The Beggar's Opera. In 1752, William Hallam sent a company of twelve actors from Britain to the colonies with his brother Lewis as their manager. They established a theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia and opened with The Merchant of Venice and The Anatomist. The company moved to New York in the summer of 1753, performing ballad operas and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida. The Revolutionary War suspended theatre in New York, but thereafter theatre resumed in 1798, the year the 2,000-seat Park Theatre was built on Chatham Street (now called Park Row). The Bowery Theatre opened in 1826, followed by others. Blackface minstrel shows, a distinctly American form of entertainment, became popular in the 1830s, and especially so with the arrival of the Virginia Minstrels in the 1840s.
Imagine a world without hello's
We'd swim about rivers of sorrow
My eyes would not see , ears would not hear
And every time you turn around , It's tomorrow
Now picture a society so far out of reach
They'd eat through mountains of their own
Feast their eyes upon a fattened youngin'
And every time they turn their backs another is gone
So paint a picture of yourself
A model of your own world
You don't know what you've got until it's gone
Imagine a world with no arms and no legs
You'd lie there sometimes asleep , others awake
You'd rather be deaf , dumb and blind
And give up your appetite to walk, one more time
Now is this the picture we've designed
And what about the others will they ever survive
And you lie there trying to figure it all out
While the rest of the world is too busy to try
To pain a picture of themselves
A model of their own world