Opening night doesn’t mean what it used to mean. It suddenly has come to mean even less than it did three years ago, when I first wrote that it had become nearly meaningless. The changes have consequences for the ticket-buying public, for professional critics, and for the New York theater ecosystem as a whole.
Here are ten facts, updated, about opening night on Broadway.
1. Opening night is still an occasion for the Broadway cast and crew to party, and for celebrities who attend to get their pictures taken, which gives publicity to the show
“Going to opening nights has become one of those activities known incomprehensibly enough as ‘the thing to do,’” Cornelia Otis Skinner wrote in a humorous essay on September 29, 1940 (accompanied by the Hirschfeld illustration, above.) “What, one presumes, makes for the brilliance of a premiere, is the presence of a goodly number of celebrities, pseudo-celebrities, and celebrity starer-atters. They are there, most of them, because it’s an opening, and they know that other celebrities, pseudo-celebrities, and celebrity starer-atters will be there. The celebrities have come chiefly to be seen, the pseudos to bask in reflected glory, and the starers are there because they’d rather see Joan Crawford in the flesh than an incarnation of Bernhardt, Ellen Terry and Salvini on the stage.”
How Hirschfeld put it: “The opening-night audience is mostly friends of the cast and backers of the show, and they come to applaud their money.”
2. Opening night is not a Broadway show’s first performance in front of a paying audience, as it used to be many decades ago. That first show is now called the first preview. Broadway producers use the preview period, which normally lasts anywhere from several days to several weeks, in the way they used to use out-of-town tryouts — to see how an audience responds, what works for them and what doesn’t; to fix structural and technical challenges; to give the performers more time to work out their character. (Critic George Jean Nathan’s definition of opening night: “The night before the play is ready to open.”) The creative team sometimes makes substantial changes in the preview period, but when opening night arrives, the show is supposed to be “frozen” (no more changes) through the end of the run.
3. If the general public and even some frequent theatergoers no longer understand the difference between a first preview and an opening night, there is a reason for this. Shows rarely publicize or promote the distinction. It’s not in their interest to do so.
4. Opening night famously meant the night that the reviews came out.
It also used to mean the night the critics attended the performance. They had just a few hours after attending a show to write it up. That reportedly stopped happening some time in the 1970s. Critics began being invited during “press nights” during the preview period. They agreed to keep their reviews under wraps until opening night, honoring what is called an embargo. This change gave the critics (at least theoretically) more time to think about the show and produce more considered reviews.
This had become such a standard practice that there was something close to outrage in 2022 when the publicist for the Broadway revival of “The Music Man” starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster announced that theater critics had to see the show on opening night, forcing them to revert to the previous practice of getting only a few hours to write their reviews. This was labeled a stunt, and was not repeated by any other production.
5. This season, suddenly, opening night no longer necessarily even means when the reviews come out. Some productions are delaying their embargoes so that they occur after opening night. “Boop,” for example, has an official opening night of Saturday, April 5, 2025 but the show’s publicists told the professional critics that their reviews couldn’t run until after 9 p.m. Monday, April 7. “Just in Time” is doing the same thing. The “opening night” is April 26th (which is the day before the deadline to be considered for Tony Awards), but the critics are forbidden to post their reviews until April 28.
Several other shows pushed the embargo to midnight of opening night, or a minute before midnight Their reasoning: They didn’t want to ruin the opening night party for cast, crew and friends, if the reviews turned out to be negative. That’s a clue to what’s really going on.
6. Tickets used to be cheaper during the preview period — as they still are during preview periods in other world class theater cities, such as London. But that changed in New York in the 1990s. (as an article in the Wall Street Journal in 2010 explained.)
Now, even though the production during preview period may be beset with flubbed lines, tech mishaps, and scenes that are later omitted, or new ones later added, the public is almost always charged the same for their tickets before opening night as after it.
The most notorious example of the abuse of the preview period was “Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark,” which began previews on November 28, 2010, and did not open officially open until June 14, 2011. A seven-month preview period; 182 preview performances, a record. Why? They wanted time to fix the show, sure. They also wanted to sell as many tickets as possible before the critics weighed in.
7. The more the professional reviews are delayed, and the more confusion sowed about the distinction between first preview and opening night, the more the role of the professional critic becomes diminished. As the critic Pauline Kael famously said: “In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.”
8. The new embargoes apply only to what are called “first night” critics, which are a small percentage of the professional theater critics who are invited to review a show. The so-called “second night” critics are always invited after opening night, which is another reason why opening night means less than it used to. The majority of critics are invited days or even weeks after the show opens, which puts them at a competitive disadvantage, given how theatergoers largely pay attention only to those reviews that come out on opening night – a situation exacerbated by the rise of the Internet.
9. Indeed, the new media landscape – the Internet and social media — is a large factor in turning opening night into a quaint anachronism, in several ways. Social media influencers and the denizens of online chat rooms start offering their opinions of these shows from the very first preview. These opinions replace what used to be called word of mouth, but they are also increasingly in effect replacing the professional reviews. Some online comments are tantamount to well-considered if abbreviated reviews. Many are not.
10. The new landscape also renders as outdated the critical hierarchy the publicists persist in imposing. Reviews on the websites of legacy publications (i.e. newspapers) don’t necessarily get more traffic than those in online-only publications. And the critics without big corporations behind them are more likely to offer the more diverse perspectives that most everybody in the theater community is at least giving lip service to wanting. Critics dismissed as “second night” often write just as well and know just as much about the theater.
There are practical reasons why the changes in opening night feel unfortunate. But what about the loss of the romance of opening night built up over the ages — the wonder, the magic, the witty takes on it, the likely apocryphal anecdotes connected to it?
Javier Badem has said his earliest memories were of his actress mother on opening nights. “I would watch her vomiting backstage on opening night, and then the next minute she became Isabella, Queen of Spain. At the time I remember thinking: What kind of schizophrenic job is this? Now it all makes sense.”
George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill: Am reserving two tickets for you to my premiere [of Pygmalion.] Come and bring a friend — if you have one.
Winston Churchill to George Bernard Shaw: Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second — if there is one.
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