On this day in 2006, with its seven-thousand-four-hundred-eighty-sixth performance Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
The Phantom of the Opera over took the composer and impresario’s other long-running stage piece
Cats with the most iterations on Broadway in the latter’s eight-year run, twice-revived in the West End for twenty-one mostly parallel years in London. The establishing megamusical phenomenon, the piece has proved polarising and defining for the entertainment industry and arguably introduces quite a bar to entry.
