Broadway’s Super Tuesdays

With all the talk of “Super Tuesday” in the political arena this week, I started wondering if Tuesday was a super day for Broadway. Have many of the long-running shows in theater history actually opened on a Tuesday? And so, with my well-worn copy of David Sheward’s It’s a Hit! — The Back Stage Book of Longest-Running Broadway Shows in one hand and a perpetual calendar in another, I set out on my search.

My calendar started at 1900, so I did, too. As it turned out, I wouldn’t find a Tuesday opening until seven hits had been listed. That was The Boomerang, which opened August 10, 1915 and played for 522 performances, just making Sheward’s cut. As does the Best Plays series, he counts a long run as 500 performances or more. But The Golddiggers, the next Tuesday opening (September 30, 1919) easily made the grade with its 722 performance run.

Those shows haven’t had super endurance, but things got markedly better for Super Tuesdays in the ’20s. Of the 10 long-runners, only one is a name that theater enthusiasts don’t know today: Kiki, a show in which a chorine falls in love with her producer. And while many people might not know Sally from Sunny, even today we do have a vague awareness of these Jerome Kern musicals.

Interesting that, in the ’20s, musicals are already making their mark as long-runners. Rose-Marie, The Student Prince, Good News, and Show Boat all opened to raves in Wednesday’s newspapers. But the three non-musicals at least ring a bell with 2004 audiences: The Show-Off, Rain, and the great-granddaddy of them all, Abie’s Irish Rose, which may have opened to lousy reviews on May 23, 1922 but played 2,327 performances. Indeed, 10 out of the decade’s 26 long-runners opening on a Tuesday; that’s 38% worth. Given that each of the seven days represents 14.28%, there’s no question that Tuesday is a super day for Broadway — so far.

Oh, those ’30s! The country shuffled off the Depression by taking in a movie twice a day but its citizens didn’t go much to Broadway shows that opened on a Tuesday. The whole decade yielded only one: The Children’s Hour. Only 18 shows reached long-run status but Tuesday still comes in with a wan .055% of those hits. So maybe Tuesdays aren’t so super after all.

Even as the economy improved and then flourished in the ’40s, only three long-runners in the entire decade opened on a Tuesday (out of 51 shows — a better but still paltry .058%). Two of them have been forgotten: Junior Miss and The Two Mrs. Carrolls, and the third, the revival of The Red Mill, wasn’t much remembered until Decca Broadway’s recent reissue of its cast album. What’s more, in the ’40s, Tobacco Road — which debuted on a Monday — became the long-run champ until it was superseded by Life with Father, which premiered on a Wednesday. Each was as close as one could get to a Tuesday but not close enough to make this day the super Broadway debut date.

By now, I was noticing something that I had thought happened much later: Most of the hits were opening on Thursdays. I would have assumed that, with the comparatively recent advent of “weekend magazine” sections that newspapers now offer their readers, Thursday openings for that coveted Friday space were a relatively recent phenomenon. Not at all. As far back as the ’20s, when Blossom Time, Broadway, and Street Scene opened, plenty of shows bowed on Thursdays — to get impulse buyers to read the raves and spring for tickets that opening weekend, I’m guessing. I also found that precious few smashes opened on a Friday. The reason is that far fewer people read the newspapers on a Saturday morning than on any other day of the week. If you expect raves, you want as many people to read them as possible; but if you expect pans, you want few people to see them. I personally learned this fact of show business life from Variety on a Wednesday in September 1964, when the publication disclosed it in conjunction with a show that had opened the previous Friday. It was called Wiener Blut and I don’t have to tell you that it was not a hit.

Back to the survey. Tuesday didn’t look so super during the ’50s, either. An even 50 shows passed 500 performances, but only three — i.e., six percent — were Tuesday openings. Of those, none has proved to have lasting value: The Happy Time (the play, not the Kander and Ebb musical), The World of Suzie Wong, and La Plume de Ma Tante. But the ’60s offered a bit of a turnaround with six out of 45 long-runners debuting on Tuesday. That’s a 13% mark, close to the 14.28% standard. I’d be inclined to say “Nowhere to go but up” but I wouldn’t want that expression to be confused with the name of the nine-performance flop that opened during that decade — on a Saturday, by the way.

Granted, the ’60s musicals that opened on Tuesdays were Milk and Honey and Golden Boy and the ’60s comedies were Any Wednesday, Butterflies Are Free, and Never Too Late (which had a character named Grace — fitting, for we’re told that “Tuesday’s child is full of grace”). Those shows may be forgotten but Tuesdays also brought us A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,Mame, and Fiddler on the Roof. That last-named musical returns Tuesday to its super status, since it became the longest-running production in Broadway history and held that title for some time.

Fiddler would be eclipsed by Grease (a Monday opening) in the ’70s, but 11 out of that decade’s 54 long-runners (more than 20%) bowed on Tuesday. The musicals offered scores both old (No, No, Nanette, Irene, Bubbling Brown Sugar, Ain’t Misbehavin’) and new (Jesus Christ Superstar, The Magic Show, Shenandoah, Godspell, Beatlemania, and Evita). Only one non-musical — Absurd Person Singular — made the Tuesdays list.

Things didn’t start out too well in the ’80s. Fourteen long-runners opened on other days before Tuesday struck with Agnes of God. Another 13 more passed before we got to I’m Not Rappaport. But on Tuesday, January 26, 1988, The Phantom of the Opera (6,710 performances and counting) opened. Does any one of us have any doubt that, two years from now, it will emerge as the long-run champ? Maybe Super Tuesday isn’t just relegated to politics after all.

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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@aol.com]