1750: "The Beggar's Opera," the first play with music performed in New York, opens.
1878: The first full Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart show, "The Mulligan Guard Picnic," debuts in New York. This expanded vaudeville sketch with dialogue, costumes and music is the genesis of the modern Broadway musical.
1902: The term "Great White Way" is first used by the New York Evening Telegram to describe Broadway.
1907: The first Ziegfeld Follies premieres at New York's Jardin de Paris. For the next 21 years the Follies define American musical theater and launch or sustain the careers of W.C. Fields, Bert Williams, Will Rogers, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice and many others, and spawns imitators such as Broadway Revue and George White's Scandals.
1916: Cole Porter's first show See America First, premieres--and flops. Porter would write several more flops before hitting it big with Paris in 1928.
1924: George and Ira Gershwin's first show, "Lady Be Good," premieres. The Gershwins help usher in a new era of sophisticated musical comedy.
1927: Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II debut "Show Boat," which has been called "the first serious American musical." It runs two years in its initial incarnation and runs another decade in nine different American revivals.
1930: Ethel Merman makes her Broadway debut singing "I Got Rhythm" in "Girl Crazy." The brassy-voiced Merman, who had a voice that supposedly could reach the back row without amplification, would come to epitomize the larger-than-life Broadway star.
1937: George Gershwin dies.
1943: "Oklahoma!" debuts. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's adaptation of the novel "Green Grow The Lilacs" fuses drama, dance and music to a degree unprecedented on Broadway and runs for a record 2,212 performances.
1957: "West Side Story" premieres. This musical adaptation of "Romeo and Juliet" featured music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, making his Broadway debut, but lost the best-musicial Tony to "The Music Man."
1960: "The Fantasticks" begins its record-setting off-Broadway run. The quintessential "charming little show" sets a record by running for 42 years and 17,162 performances before closing in 2002.
1967: "Hair" makes its off-Broadway debut, prior to hitting Broadway in April 1968. "Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical" breaks Broadway barriers for language, drugs, sexuality, nudity, race, and sound, and runs for 1,750 performances.
1971: Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's first Broadway musical, "Jesus Christ Superstar," premieres. In the subsequent three decades, Lloyd Webber's musicals--including "Evita," "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera"--become the most-watched musicals of all time.
1994: "Beauty and the Beast," Disney's first Broadway musical, premieres on Broadway. It runs for 5,464 performances, making it Broadway's sixth-longest running production, and grosses more than $1.4 billion worldwide.
1996: "Rent" premieres on Broadway. The show draws acclaim for its rock-heavy score and its sensitive treatment of adult themes like AIDS. Rent runs 12 years and 5,124 performances, making it the eighth-longest-running Broadway show, and grosses more than $280 million.