E2 Guide

A Guide to Broadway

The most moving moments from thirty years of Broadway: ten landmark performances on video, and twenty essential songs to listen to right now. Broadway is the greatest live art form in America, and it should not be a luxury good.

The average Broadway ticket in the 2025–2026 season was $131.09. That is the Broadway League's own number: $1.91 billion grossed across 14,577,322 attendees. Great seats routinely run $200 and up. Most people will never sit in those seats, so we brought the seats to them. Everything on this page is free. Source: The Broadway League 2025–2026 season statistics, via BroadwayWorld.
Part One

Ten Performances to Watch

The moments people still talk about, in the order they shook the theater world.

No. 1

Defying Gravity

Wicked
Idina Menzel, the original Elphaba, performing the song that ends Act One with a full symphony. The moment a good witch decides she would rather be good on her own terms than great on someone else's.
No. 2

My Shot

Hamilton
The song that introduced the world to Hamilton, performed for the show's 10th anniversary in New York. A room full of people rapping about not throwing away their shot, a decade after the shot landed.
No. 3

Circle of Life

The Lion King
The opening number of The Lion King in 360 degrees. Julie Taymor's puppetry turned a cartoon into theater history, and this sunrise still gives people chills thirty years later.
No. 4

Seasons of Love

Rent
The original 1996 Broadway cast performing at the Tony Awards. Jonathan Larson died the night before the show opened off-Broadway; this is the song his friends sang to keep him in the room.
No. 5

You Will Be Found

Dear Evan Hansen
The Broadway and touring companies, assembled on the Music Box Theatre stage for the official video. A song written for anyone who has ever felt invisible, performed by the company that won six Tonys with it.
No. 6

Satisfied

Hamilton
Renée Elise Goldsberry's tour-de-force: the entire first act of Hamilton retold in four minutes from Angelica Schuyler's point of view. The fastest rap on Broadway, and somehow the saddest song in the show.
No. 7

Bring Him Home

Les Misérables
Alfie Boe and Ramin Karimloo, two of the great Valjeans, singing the show's prayer side by side. Les Mis has run somewhere in the world every year since 1985; this is why.
No. 8

For Good

Wicked
Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, the original Elphaba and Glinda, reuniting for the song about how people change each other. Twenty years of friendship, one song.
No. 9

Wait for It

Hamilton
Leslie Odom Jr. performing Burr's anthem at a Public Theater gala. The villain's song that half the audience secretly claims as their own: patience as a survival strategy.
No. 10

Think of Me

The Phantom of the Opera
The closing cast of Phantom's record 35-year Broadway run. The longest-running show in Broadway history took its final bow in 2023; this is how it sounded at the end.
Part Two

Twenty Songs to Hear

The cast recordings, mostly the original Broadway companies. Press play on any of them.

Wicked (2003)

Hamilton (2015)

The Lion King (1997)

Rent (1996)

Dear Evan Hansen (2016)

Les Misérables (10th Anniversary Concert)

The Phantom of the Opera (1988)