Below are the five most popular posts in the five years since I began NewYorkTheater.me in May 2012.
(Above are some of the profile portraits I’ve used over the past five years, none of them of my actual face.)
I’ve done nearly 1,800 posts — or about one a day — since my very first post, which was a list of what shows were then currently running on Broadway. Of the 37 shows I listed then, only five are still playing: The Book of Mormon, Chicago, The Lion King, The Phantom of the Opera, and Wicked.
So five seems like a good number. Readers clicked — and are still clicking — on these five posts from NewYorkTheater.me, more than any others. (Click on the titles to bring you to the original posts.)
The 50 Best Plays of The Past 100 Years
June 27, 2013
This list of best American plays (not productions) is by far my most popular post, which initially made me feel guilty, since the list was put together by the critics of Entertainment Weekly. I certainly agree with the top, say, five:
1. Death of a Salesman 
2. A Streetcar Named Desire 
3. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: 
4. Long Day’s Journey into Night
5.Fences
Quiz: Which character in Hamilton are you?
July 15, 2015
This I put together myself, and (you won’t be surprised to hear), is just the most popular of my many popular Hamilton posts. (The sixth most popular of all time is Hamilton on Broadway New Cast: What Has Changed? posted on December 15, 2016)
Broadway’s Best Dance Numbers
July 2, 2013
I put this together from the results of a contest I ran requesting that readers answer the question:
What single dance number was the best you ever saw on Broadway?
I matched the most common responses with videos of the dance numbers (at least the ones I could find.)
Broadway 2013-2014 Season Guide
June 22, 2013
I’ve done a preview of every Broadway season since I started NewYorkTheater.me; I have NO idea why this particular season remains so popular.
Slings and Arrows Returns!
June 4, 2012
My first, biggest and, alas, virtually only scoop, I got Bob Martin, one of the creators and stars of the beloved Canadian backstage cult TV series “Slings and Arrows” to tell me exclusively (via Twitter) that the team was thinking of reviving the show for a fourth season. I put this into a post, and, since Bob Martin doesn’t Tweet much and he was otherwise unreachable, it got more visitors by far in a single day than I got before or since — and the story made news all over the world.
An entire year of suspense for Slings and Arrows fans followed — relentlessly tortured by such teases as Slings and Arrow star Paul Gross saying in an interview, “if they came back and said do you want to do another [season] everyone would say yeah…It was an enormous amount of fun to do.”) — until Martin finally said (in a conventional) interview) that they’d abandoned the idea of a fourth season, but may do a special. Well, its been five years and even that hasn’t happened. But my Twitter interview and its consequences were studied in college courses, and Martin himself said he learned two valuable lessons — that Social Media is powerful, and that he shouldn’t Tweet drunk.
No Reviews?
I am a theater critic and this site contains more reviews than any other kind of article. Yet only two of my reviews made it to the top 20;
Les Miserables Review: Darkened Stages, Brilliant Broadway Cast
Hamilton Review: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hip-Hopped History Musical
