The Phantom of the Opera played its 13,981st and final Broadway show on April 16, 2023 — the longest run in Broadway history.

On April 16, 2023, *The Phantom of the Opera* gave its 13,981st and final Broadway performance at the Majestic Theatre, ending the longest run in the history of the American stage.

For 35 years, a chandelier rose over the Majestic Theatre and crashed back down eight times a week. On April 16, 2023, it did so for the last time. As NPR reported, the show closed after 13,981 performances — a number no other production in Broadway history has come close to matching. When the cast took its final bow, they were ending not just a run but a record.

The math is almost hard to hold. *Phantom* opened on Broadway on January 26, 1988, and by the time it shut, it had outlasted the entire recorded lifespan of most competing shows several times over. TheaterMania, in a piece pointedly titled "Broadway Shockers: The Phantom of the Opera Actually Closes on Broadway," logged the finale as "show number 13,981" at the Majestic — the same theater that had housed it from the beginning.

Why did the longest-running show on Broadway close?

The short answer is money. *Phantom* is an enormous production — a full orchestra, elaborate sets, that famous falling chandelier, and a large cast and crew. Weekly running costs run high, and the pandemic shutdown of 2020 hit Broadway hard, thinning tourist audiences that a spectacle of this scale depends on to fill seats. Producer Cameron Mackintosh announced the closing in 2022, then extended it once as ticket sales surged among fans wanting to see it before the doors shut for good.

That surge is telling. The end of a 35-year run became its own event. CBS News, covering the closing under the headline "The Phantom of the Opera closes on Broadway after record 35 year run," noted the demand that pushed the final date later than originally planned. People who had grown up with the show — or whose parents had — came to say goodbye.

The record itself is worth stating precisely, because Broadway keeps careful books. The count of 13,981 performances is not a marketing figure; it is tracked by The Broadway League, the trade association that maintains the official tallies for productions running in New York's commercial theaters. A commissioned verification against those records in 2026 confirmed the number and the standing: measured by total performances, no Broadway show has ever run longer.

How do we know it was really the longest run?

Because "longest-running" can mean different things, the distinction matters. *Phantom*'s claim rests on raw performance count — the number of times the curtain went up — logged by the Broadway League and echoed independently by NPR, TheaterMania, and CBS News. That is a countable, checkable fact rather than a boast. Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical simply played more shows on Broadway than anything before it, and by a wide margin over the runner-up, his own *Cats*.

One concrete detail from the final night captures the scale of what ended: the chandelier. In the story, it plunges toward the audience during the overture, a piece of stagecraft that greeted more than 19 million people over the years. On April 16, 2023, it fell for the last time in front of a packed house, and the room reportedly rose to its feet before the actors had even finished.

What remains open is whether the record is safe. Broadway's longest runs were built in an era of steady tourist traffic and lower relative production costs, conditions that have grown harder to reproduce. Some in the industry argue that no new show will ever be allowed to run three and a half decades again — that the economics simply won't permit it. Others point out that people said similar things before *Phantom* proved them wrong. For now, 13,981 stands as the number to beat, and no one is close.