Broadway & Musicals Trivia

From velvet curtains on 44th Street to national tours crossing the country, Broadway has spent more than a century turning big emotions into even bigger showstoppers. This quiz digs into the composers, source material, and legends behind some of the stage's most enduring hits.

Where the Stories Come From

Broadway rarely invents from scratch — it adapts. Wicked reimagines Oz, West Side Story reimagines Shakespeare, and Les Misérables borrows its sweep from a nineteenth-century French novel. Even Hairspray started life as a John Waters film before it picked up a chorus line and a Tony Award.

• Wicked spins a prequel out of L. Frank Baum's Oz mythology.
• Rent transplants Puccini's La Bohème into the East Village.
• Cats turns T.S. Eliot's playful poetry into an entire evening of song and dance.

The Composers Behind the Curtain

A handful of names keep showing up in the credits. Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Lin-Manuel Miranda each reshaped what a musical could sound like, while the Tony Awards — named for theater actress and producer Antoinette Perry — have honored the best of it since 1947. Long after a show closes, its cast recording usually keeps the songs very much alive.