The 10 Longest-Running Broadway Shows Still Playing

Bea, hosting, and here's the thing about longevity lists: they're usually obituaries. This one isn't. Every show Celia's about to rank is playing tonight, and you can still buy a ticket to all ten of them. The counts are the League's, the asides are Celia's, and the No. 1 has been running since before some of its current cast was born. Celia — take us down the aisle.

The countdown

10. MJ — 1,981 performances (opened February 1, 2022, Neil Simon Theatre)

The baby of this list is in its fifth year and closing in on two thousand performances, which tells you everything about the modern Broadway economy: a show doesn't get a decade to grow anymore, it arrives hot or it doesn't arrive. MJ arrived white-hot and hasn't cooled. Sit close enough to watch the footwork and you'll understand why it's the youngest tenant on this page with the oldest soul.

9. Six — 2,105 performances (opened October 3, 2021, Lena Horne Theatre)

Six queens, eighty minutes, no interval, and a finale the audience sings like a football chant. Six is the leanest machine in this top ten — a concert wearing a musical's clothes — and leanness ages well: low running costs, a young audience that keeps replacing itself, and word of mouth that behaves like a relay race. (A parenthetical whisper: if you're taking a first-timer to anything on this list, start here. It's over before their knees complain, and they'll be converted by the second song.)

8. Hadestown — 2,516 performances (opened April 17, 2019, Walter Kerr Theatre)

The little folk opera that could, in one of Broadway's most intimate houses. Hadestown survives on devotion rather than scale — its audience doesn't just attend, it proselytises, and a roomful of evangelists a night adds up to two and a half thousand performances. The Walter Kerr's size is the secret: scarcity keeps the flame lit, and the show's road-to-hell romance lands harder when the band's close enough to sweat on you. Metaphorically. Mostly.

7. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child — 2,812 performances (opened April 22, 2018, Lyric Theatre)

The only straight play on this list, and it's holding a musical-sized room — the Lyric is a barn, and this production fills it with stage magic that still makes adults gasp out loud. Nearly twenty-nine hundred performances in, the casting keeps refreshing the draw: Tom Felton, the films' Draco, is in the company this season, and fresh names keep arriving behind him. Families plan trips around this show. That's not a run, that's infrastructure.

6. Hamilton — 4,045 performances (opened August 6, 2015, Richard Rodgers Theatre)

Four thousand performances of a show that was supposed to be too dense, too fast and too new to last. Hamilton's still selling out at the Rodgers — it filled every seat again in the League's latest week — because it stopped being a hit years ago and became a rite: the show people take their kids to so the kids can say they were in the room. A decade on, the room's still full. That's not a run, that's tenure.

5. Aladdin — 4,605 performances (opened March 20, 2014, New Amsterdam Theatre)

Disney's quiet workhorse. Aladdin doesn't dominate headlines, it just opens its doors eight times a week in one of the most beautiful houses on Broadway and sends families home happy, four thousand six hundred times and counting. The flying carpet still gets its round of applause, the Genie still stops the show, and the New Amsterdam still looks like a jewellery box. Longevity isn't always loud. Sometimes it's a lamp, rubbed nightly.

4. The Book of Mormon — 5,803 performances (opened March 24, 2011, Eugene O'Neill Theatre)

Fifteen years of sold-out irreverence from the smallest house on this list's upper half. Mormon endures because the joke density never drops — there's a laugh every thirty seconds, engineered like clockwork — and because the O'Neill's intimacy turns every performance into a shared secret the audience gets to keep retelling. It opened in 2011 as the rude new kid. It's now the establishment, which is the funniest plot twist it ever wrote.

3. Wicked — 8,979 performances (opened October 30, 2003, Gershwin Theatre)

Twenty-three years at the Gershwin, and the green girl's just 21 performances shy of nine thousand as of November 1 — she'll cross it within days of this list printing. Wicked's engine is generational: the teenagers who saw it in 2004 are bringing their own teenagers now, and the films have poured a second river of new fans into the same house. The Gershwin is Broadway's biggest barn, and filling a barn for two decades is the hardest trick on this page.

2. The Lion King — 11,441 performances (opened November 13, 1997, New Amsterdam Theatre; at the Minskoff Theatre since 2006)

Julie Taymor's opening sunrise has now risen more than eleven thousand times, and it still silences a full house in the first three minutes — I've watched it happen, from the back row, with jaded New Yorkers crying into their programmes. The Lion King is Disney's longest-running production and Broadway's highest-grossing show ever, and its secret is embarrassingly simple: it's a first show for children that never insults the adults sitting beside them. Generations are quite literally queuing up to replace each other.

1. Chicago — 11,816 performances (opened November 14, 1996, Richard Rodgers Theatre; at the Ambassador Theatre since 2003)

And the champion: a revival. Chicago came back in 1996 as a stripped-down concert staging — black costumes, a band on stage, nowhere to hide — and it's now the longest-running show currently on Broadway, the longest-running American musical in Broadway history, and, this month, thirty years old. It survives because it's unkillable by design: no set to date, no effects to age, a score that swings, and a rotating Roxie and Velma that give every generation its own door in. Eleven thousand eight hundred sixteen performances of razzle-dazzle, and the jazz is still hot. All that, and it started life as the cheap option. Never bet against the show with nothing to break.

Bea, to close. Read the dates again — the top two opened a year apart, in 1996 and 1997, and they're still seating thousands of people a week while shows that opened last spring are already memories. Longevity on Broadway isn't an accident; it's a design choice, a house that fits, and an audience that keeps handing the ticket down. Pick one from this list and go be part of its count. The number goes up eight times a week.

Performance counts from Playbill's longest-running shows list — figures from the Broadway League, as of Nov. 1, 2026, previews excluded; still-playing confirmed against the Broadway League's current grosses table; dates and theatres spot-checked at IBDB, the League's own database.