The Broadway League

In 2024, Jason Laks was identified by the League as its president, marking a new leadership era after the long tenure associated with Charlotte St. Martin. The change came as Broadway continued adapting to post-pandemic conditions, evolving audience strategies, labor challenges, and expanded engagement programs. Leadership transitions are especially important for a trade association because they shape how the organization balances member advocacy, public messaging, education, and inclusion initiatives. Laks’s presidency represents the League’s current phase, with responsibility for guiding Broadway’s principal trade body through a changing commercial and cultural environment.

In September 2021, the League helped organize Curtain Up!, a large public festival in Times Square celebrating Broadway’s return after the COVID-19 shutdown that had darkened theatres in March 2020. The event gathered performers, fans, and partner organizations for concerts and community programming tied to reopening weekend. As a milestone, Curtain Up! symbolized the League’s role in shepherding Broadway through crisis and recovery, not only behind the scenes in policy and coordination but also publicly in restoring confidence, visibility, and excitement. It marked a ceremonial and economic turning point in Broadway’s reemergence as a live-performance industry.

In 2017, the League launched Broadway Bridges in partnership with New York City public schools and the United Federation of Teachers, giving public high school students the opportunity to attend a Broadway show before graduation. The initiative became one of the most ambitious theatre education partnerships in city history, extending Broadway access to students from all five boroughs. Its importance lies in combining arts education, civic partnership, and audience development at scale. Broadway Bridges exemplified the League’s increasingly public-service-oriented mission by treating Broadway attendance as an educational and cultural opportunity, not only a commercial transaction.

On March 21, 2016, Theatre Development Fund and the Broadway League launched Theatre Access NYC, a website designed to help theatregoers with disabilities find accessible Broadway performances. The project centralized information about accommodations and specialized performance formats, making it easier for audiences to plan attendance without navigating scattered or inconsistent sources. This milestone is important because it shows the League using digital infrastructure to reduce barriers to participation and support inclusion in a practical way. It also reflected a broader understanding that audience development requires not only marketing, but also accessible pathways into the Broadway experience.

In 2014, the League launched BROADWAY.ORG, merging earlier web platforms into a single official online destination for Broadway in New York and on tour. The site brought together show information, maps, multimedia, location-based search, and direct links to official ticketing and production resources. This was a significant digital milestone because it modernized how the League communicated with audiences and strengthened its role as an authoritative source amid a confusing online ticket marketplace. By consolidating information in one League-run platform, the organization improved consumer navigation while also reinforcing Broadway’s official digital presence.

On May 11, 2012, the League launched Viva Broadway, an audience-development initiative intended to build stronger relationships between Broadway and Hispanic communities across the United States. The program aimed to increase awareness, cultural connection, and participation through partnerships, education, events, and advocacy. Its launch showed the League expanding its audience strategy beyond traditional marketing and toward sustained engagement with specific communities historically underrepresented in commercial theatre attendance. Viva Broadway became an important marker of the organization’s efforts to diversify Broadway’s future audience and more deliberately connect the industry with the demographics of modern America.

On September 22, 2009, the League and the Coalition of Broadway Unions and Guilds presented the first annual Broadway Salutes. The event was created to recognize veteran Broadway employees whose decades of work in performance, backstage crafts, and technical trades often occurred outside the public spotlight. By celebrating 25-, 35-, and 50-year careers, the program acknowledged that Broadway’s success depends on a deeply experienced labor force as much as on stars and producers. The milestone showcased the League’s role in uniting different sectors of the industry and publicly validating the human infrastructure behind commercial theatre.

On December 18, 2007, the association adopted the name The Broadway League. The change reflected the fact that its membership had grown to include not only theatre owners and producers but also presenters, general managers, and other industry professionals. The new name was shorter, more recognizable, and more closely tied to the public meaning of Broadway as both a place and a brand. This rebranding was a major milestone because it aligned the organization’s identity with the broader community it represented and made its mission easier to communicate to media, policymakers, audiences, and members across North America.

In late 2006, the League announced Charlotte St. Martin as its new executive director, bringing in a leader with experience in tourism, hospitality, and civic organizations. Her appointment came at a time when the League was balancing Broadway-specific issues with national touring concerns, audience development, and industry modernization. Under her long tenure, the organization would become more visible in education, outreach, branding, and digital initiatives. The leadership change mattered because it marked a generational transition in how the League presented itself publicly and how it connected Broadway’s economic interests to tourism, access, and cultural policy.

In 2005, the League launched Family First Nights, a program intended to invite economically at-risk families to attend Broadway performances. The initiative reflected the organization’s growing commitment to community engagement and access, not only industry promotion. By emphasizing regular family attendance and exposure to theatre at a formative age, the program aligned with the League’s broader research-driven belief that early experiences help create lifelong audiences. Family First Nights also demonstrated how the League was positioning Broadway as a cultural resource for New Yorkers who might otherwise face barriers of cost or familiarity in reaching commercial theatre.

In 1996, the League and Theatre Development Fund created Kids’ Night on Broadway, an audience-development initiative designed to introduce children and teenagers to live theatre. The program became one of the organization’s signature public-facing efforts, using free or discounted youth admission with a paying adult to cultivate future theatregoers. Its significance lies in how clearly it expanded the League’s mission beyond internal trade concerns toward long-term audience building. Over time, the initiative also spread beyond New York to touring markets, showing how the League could combine education, marketing, and accessibility into a durable national program.

Also in 1996, Karen Hauser of the League’s research department conceived the Internet Broadway Database, or IBDB, which became one of the organization’s most influential informational resources. By organizing production histories, creative credits, and theatre records in a searchable online format, the League helped build an authoritative digital reference for Broadway scholarship, journalism, and fandom. The milestone matters because it placed the organization at the center of Broadway data stewardship in the internet era. IBDB expanded the League’s public value by making historical and production information far more accessible than it had been in earlier decades.

In 1985, the organization renamed itself the League of American Theatres and Producers, acknowledging that its membership and influence had expanded far beyond New York. By this point, the League’s concerns increasingly included touring productions, presenters, and commercial theatre activity across the United States. The change was more than cosmetic: it signaled that the association had become a national trade body for the broader Broadway economy. This repositioning helped frame Broadway not simply as a Manhattan-based institution, but as a North American commercial theatre network with touring, presenting, and producing interests nationwide.

In 1982, the League helped establish the Commercial Theater Institute in partnership with Theatre Development Fund. The initiative was designed to train and develop emerging producers, addressing a structural need within the Broadway ecosystem by helping cultivate future commercial theatre leadership. Rather than only serving existing members, the League was now actively investing in industry continuity and professional education. The institute became an important expression of the organization’s broader mission: sustaining Broadway not just through advocacy and contracts, but by building the knowledge base and pipeline needed for future productions and entrepreneurs.

In 1973, the League changed its name from the League of New York Theatres to the League of New York Theatres and Producers. The revised name recognized how the organization’s mission had grown beyond theatre operators alone and now more fully included the producing side of commercial theatre. This was an important organizational milestone because it reflected the League’s widening constituency and a more integrated view of how Broadway functioned as an industry. The name change also foreshadowed the broader national expansion that would define the League’s later decades.

In 1967, the League entered one of its most visible and lasting partnerships when it joined the American Theatre Wing in presenting and administering the Tony Awards. The timing coincided with the awards’ first national telecast, giving the League a powerful public platform tied to Broadway excellence and national promotion. This partnership linked the industry’s trade association directly to its most prestigious honors, strengthening the League’s role not only in business and labor matters but also in shaping Broadway’s public identity, media profile, and annual cycle of recognition.

A major outgrowth of the League’s anti-scalping campaign arrived in 1940, when the Theater Ticket Code of Fair Practice, developed with Actors’ Equity, became state law in New York. The measure helped formalize protections for theatregoers and reputable sellers, and it showed that the organization could convert industry advocacy into durable public policy. The code became one of the League’s earliest enduring achievements, reinforcing Broadway’s commercial legitimacy and helping create a more orderly market for theatre tickets in the state most closely associated with the Broadway business.

By 1938, the League had assumed a formal labor role as the official collective bargaining unit representing Broadway theatre owners and producers. This institutionalized one of the organization’s most important long-term functions: negotiating industry agreements with unions and guilds. The development marked a shift from a body focused largely on ticketing and shared business interests to one central to Broadway’s labor relations system. That role has remained critical to the operation of the commercial theatre industry, where productions depend on complex agreements with performers, stage managers, musicians, and other workers.

Within a year of its creation, the organization achieved an important policy success by persuading New York State to strengthen regulation of ticket brokers. This early legislative victory demonstrated that the League was not only a membership body but also an advocacy organization capable of shaping the legal environment around Broadway commerce. The effort reflected the founding mission of protecting audiences and reputable theatrical businesses, while also helping stabilize box-office practices at a time when secondary ticket speculation was a major concern for producers and theatre owners.

In 1930, Broadway theatre operators organized the League of New York Theatres, the predecessor to today’s Broadway League. The new trade association was created to protect legitimate theatre businesses and audiences, especially from abusive ticket speculation and other practices that harmed public trust. Its formation also gave commercial Broadway a permanent institution through which owners and producers could coordinate policy, speak collectively, and negotiate on industry-wide issues. That founding structure became the basis for the League’s long-term role as Broadway’s central trade organization.