Cats started as a book of poems
Before CATS was a musical, it was a book of funny verse. T. S. Eliot wrote Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats in 1939, partly for his godchildren, and more than forty years later Andrew Lloyd Webber set the poems to music. The show opened in London's WEST END in 1981 and ran there for 21 years. Its best-known song, 'Memory', isn't in the book at all: the director, Trevor Nunn, built its LYRICS partly from lines in a different Eliot poem.
Plenty of musicals begin on the page. WICKED comes from Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel retelling The Wizard of Oz from the witch's side, and ANNIE from a newspaper comic strip that started in 1924.
A rap about a Treasury Secretary
In 2009 Lin-Manuel Miranda was invited to perform at a poetry evening at the White House. He announced a hip-hop piece about Alexander Hamilton, America's first Treasury Secretary, and the audience laughed, thinking he was joking. He had got the idea from a biography he picked up as holiday reading. HAMILTON opened on BROADWAY in 2015, telling the story of America's founders through rap and R&B with a cast chosen to look like America today, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was not the first musical to do so. RENT won in 1996, but its writer, Jonathan Larson, died suddenly the night before its first preview, aged 35, and never saw it become a hit that ran on Broadway for twelve years.
It follows the oldest rule in the business: a SHOW TUNE has to move the story on. Characters burst into song at the moment speaking is no longer enough — when they want something badly, or have just made up their minds to act.
Shows that never close
The biggest hits run for decades. The Phantom of the Opera played on Broadway for 35 years and nearly 14,000 performances before closing in 2023, the longest run in Broadway history. In London, Les Misérables has been on stage since 1985 — though the WEST END's longest run of all belongs to a play, not a musical: Agatha Christie's murder mystery The Mousetrap, running since 1952. Long-running shows add a MATINEE, an afternoon performance, even though the word comes from the French for morning.
A lamp for the ghosts
When a theatre shuts for the night, one light stays on: a single bare bulb on a stand in the middle of the STAGE, called the ghost light. The sensible reason is safety, so nobody walks off the edge of a dark stage into the orchestra pit. The theatrical reason, according to backstage tradition, is to keep the theatre's ghosts company, or to let them put on a show of their own once everyone has gone home. When theatres around the world closed in 2020, many left their ghost lights burning as a promise to reopen. Theatre people are a superstitious lot in general: wishing an actor good luck before a show is thought to bring bad luck, so they say 'break a leg' instead.