ABSTRACT
If you look at the history of the commercial theatre, if you literally chart Broadway openings as a reliable barometer of the commercial theatre, you’ll find that, in the ’20s, there were nearly three hundred productions a season. That number fell in the late ’20s, and for one concrete reason:
The Jazz Singer
. From the late ’20s to the late ’40s, the number of Broadway productions continued to fall to an average of around eighty plays or so. The next big downturn Broadway took was in the late ’40s, with the rise of television, and that brought Broadway to the state it’s in now, when there will be thirty to forty plays a season, maximum. Talking pictures and then television cut into Broadway theatre — and into theatre as a centerpiece of American culture — and theatre has never recovered, becoming over this period a very secondary part of American culture. In the ’30s and ’40s, Broadway would lead
Variety
; now it’s often relegated to a few pages near the back. Its prominence in general interest publications has similarly declined.
