Seven Lucky Years @NewYorkTheater: 50 Best Plays, 10 Best Dance Numbers, Hamilton, Then She Fell

Below are the seven most popular posts in the seven years since I began NewYorkTheater.me in May 2012.

Below that  are the seven most popular reviews, and below that 10 of the profile portraits I’ve used over the past seven years, none of them of my actual face.

I’ve done more than 2,500 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.

(Click on the titles to bring you to the original posts.)

The 50 Best Plays of The Past 100 Years

Philip Seymour Hoffman in Death of a Salesman, 2013

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 (1949) by Arthur Miller

2. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) by Tennessee Williams

3. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: (1962) by Edward Albee

4. Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956) by Eugene O’Neill

5.Fences(1985) by August Wilson

 

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. (See below.)

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.

Hamilton Broadway New Cast: What Has Changed

December 15, 2016

 

Social Media On Stage: Theater Meets Twitter,Facebook,Youtube, Tumbler, Soundcloud…

January 3, 2013

Theater, the original social media, meets its digital counterparts in form-breaking new live/virtual experiments. It’s intriguing how little of this experimenting in stage and social media hybrids has taken hold in the six years since. We’re onto other things now, like podcasts, and multi-genre arts centers.

 

Most Popular Reviews

I am a theater critic and this site contains more reviews than any other kind of article. None of the reviews were in the top seven, but here are the seven most popular reviews over the past seven years:

Les Miserables Review: Darkened Stages, Brilliant Broadway Cast

Then She Fell Review: Alice in An Immersive Wonderland

Hamilton Review: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hip-Hopped History Musical

Aladdin Review: A Genie Works His Magic on Broadway

Hamilton on Broadway 2019: New Cast, New Clarity

The Grand Paradise Theater Review: Bushwick’s Titillating Tropical Resort

Intimacy Review: Pornography On Theatre Row

Author: New York Theater

Jonathan Mandell is a 3rd generation NYC journalist, who sees shows, reads plays, writes reviews and sometimes talks with people.

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