Happy Birthday to Us! Broadway.com Celebrates 10 Years on the Great White Way

Let me take you back to May 1, 2000... A pre-Producers Matthew Broderick and stage newcomer Parker Posey were wondering how long they’d be stuck in the just-opened flop Taller Than a Dwarf... Susan Stroman was basking in her second set of smashing reviews of the season, as The Music Man followed Contact into critics’ hearts... Business was booming at the Winter Garden Theatre again, where fans were crawling back for one last look at the 18-year-old Cats... And in the wee hours of the morning, a new theater website with a million dollar name took its first bow on the World Wide Web.

Featured on our first oh-so-purple homepage: a Q&A with George C. Wolfe, who took on critics who failed to see the beauty in his new but struggling Wild Party; a Fresh Face feature on Rent vet Maya Days, playing the hooker-with-a-voice-of-gold Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar; and a lively video feature on “freestyle” from the four talented stars of off-Broadway’s The Bomb-itty of Errors.

The purple may be gone, but our passion for bringing our readers stories about the most arresting stars and shows on Broadway and beyond remains. And 10 years in, Broadway.com has become more than just a great read. The company is also now a ticketing powerhouse, selling more than $75 million worth of full-price and group Broadway tickets every year.

We produce more hours of video covering the theater industry every year than any other outlet, and we’ve created many pioneering original features, including our popular Word of Mouth segments, which look to regular theatergoers to review Broadway shows. We also let theater fans have their say with our first-of-their-kind Broadway.com Audience Awards, which will be presented for the 11th time later this month.

Although we are now almost 100 strong, Broadway.com launched with a small, core staff that I’m happy to still work alongside every day: managing editor Beth Stevens, photographer Bruce Glikas and, on the ticketing end, Drew Kupchin and Matt Kupchin, who is now the company president. The site wouldn’t have grown so fast without the passion and talent of each of them, or any of our current staff members.

To celebrate our decade on the beat, we’ll be bringing you fun top 10 lists all month, starting with our list of 10 performers whose stars rose over the past decade. (In 2000, the only “Sutton” we knew was a snooty street on the East Side!). We hope you enjoy them.

Thanks for clicking!

Paul Wontorek
Editor-in-Chief