Student Blog: The Unfinished Business of Broadway

As 2025 comes to a close, I’ve noticed that the instinct to look ahead feels less urgent than the need to pause. Broadway doesn’t move in neat yearly cycles the way we often pretend it does. It doesn’t reset when the calendar changes or when a season ends. Things carry over in ways that are easy to miss if you’re only paying attention to what’s opening next. Conversations don’t end so much as they pause. Unanswered questions tend to return. The closer you are to the work, the harder it is to treat the present as separate from the past. It starts to feel continuous, shaped by what remains unresolved as much as by what’s new.

That continuity matters, especially when considering the origins of American musical theatre and their ongoing influence. The form did not develop in a cultural landscape free from harm or exclusion, and confronting that history is necessary. Early popular entertainment in the United States included practices rooted in racial caricature and exploitation. These practices are not defensible, not acceptable, and have no place in contemporary theatre. While they are widely condemned today, their influence shaped structures, conventions, and commercial habits that later theatre inherited. Acknowledging this history isn’t about preserving it or validating it. It’s about preventing those foundations from remaining invisible or being repeated. The point isn’t to provoke discomfort, but to establish clarity. The future of the form depends on understanding these origins well enough to reject them.

What complicates this history, and keeps Broadway from being reduced to its worst foundations, is that it has also been shaped by resistance. Progress didn’t arrive because the industry generously made space. It arrived because people pushed against the limits they were given, working inside systems that weren’t built to support them and slowly forcing those systems to stretch. Broadway has always evolved under pressure. Change came unevenly, sometimes too late, sometimes only partially, but it came because artists refused to treat exclusion as permanent or silence as inevitable. That same tension appears whenever Broadway convinces itself it has figured things out. There have been long stretches where the industry leaned heavily on the idea of a formula or a correct structure. Those periods often look stable from the outside, but they rarely last. Each time Broadway settles too comfortably into what it knows, something disrupts it. Cultural shifts outside the theatre begin demanding new language inside it. New voices arrive carrying stories that don’t fit the existing frame. Economic realities force reassessment. The form moves forward not through stability, but through friction, and that friction has always been uncomfortable for institutions built on tradition. 

Access sits at the center of that discomfort. Not just who is allowed to make work, but who feels invited to experience it. Broadway has moved back and forth between feeling distant and suddenly intimate, between functioning as a closed ecosystem and opening itself as a shared public space. Those shifts aren’t abstract. They shape who sees themselves reflected in the room and who feels like an observer rather than a participant. They influence whether theatre feels like something you belong to or something you admire from a distance. Access isn’t just about tickets or opportunities. It’s about whether people feel the room was meant for them at all. Scale complicates this further. Broadway learned how to become large, durable, and marketable, and that growth brought visibility and longevity that helped the industry survive. At the same time, expansion created distance. As the form grew, proximity was often the first thing to be lost. Some of the most lasting moments in theatre history weren’t defined by spectacle or size, but by closeness, by work that felt human rather than impressive. That unresolved tension between scale and intimacy still shapes what Broadway rewards, protects, and prioritizes. 

The pause in 2020 made these contradictions impossible to ignore. When Broadway went dark, the loss wasn’t only financial or artistic. It was communal. What disappeared was the act of gathering, the shared attention of strangers agreeing to sit together and witness something unfold live. When the theatre returned, that exchange felt more fragile, more deliberate, and harder to take for granted. Absence had altered the meaning of presence in ways the industry is still adjusting to. The seasons leading into 2025 reflect that unsettledness. New work exists alongside nostalgia. Experimentation overlaps with caution. There’s a visible tension between honoring legacy and responding to the present moment, and Broadway doesn’t feel resolved right now. Historically, that lack of resolution is revealing. Transitional periods expose what an industry values, what it fears, and what it’s willing, or unwilling, to change. They strip away the illusion of certainty. I don’t feel compelled to predict where Broadway is headed next. You don’t always see the change. You do feel the responsibility. Broadway isn’t simply something to celebrate or defend. It’s something to examine, to question, and to hold accountable. Appreciation without reflection is as limiting as criticism without care.

Loving theatre means holding complexity without rushing to resolve it. It means recognizing beauty alongside harm, innovation alongside resistance, and progress alongside what remains unfinished. Those contradictions aren’t incidental. They’re built into the structure of the industry. As this year ends, Broadway feels unfinished, but then again, it always has. That refusal to arrive at certainty, that constant state of becoming, may be the very thing that keeps it alive. Broadway survives not because it perfects itself, but because it continues to respond, recalibrate, and remain in dialogue with the world around it.