Lyric Theatre Tickets

The original Lyric, managed by the Shubert Brothers, opened on October 12, 1903 with Old Heidelberg starring Richard Mansfield. Most of its successes were musical. Two major composers of operetta had hits there: Oscar Straus, whose most famous show, The Chocolate Soldier (based on Shaw’s Arms and the Man), opened at the Lyric in 1909 to run for 296 performances, and Rudolf Friml, whose first show, The Firefly, opened at the Lyric in 1912. Friml’s last hit, The Three Musketeers, produced by the fabled Florenz Ziegfeld, played there for seven months in 1928 (an impressive run in those days).

The glory years of the Lyric, the 1920s, belonged to musical comedy in an era when both the music and the comedy were equally dazzling. During that decade, Fred and Adele Astaire appeared in For Goodness Sake, scored partly by the Gershwins. The Marx Brothers had their second Broadway hit (and the source of their first film) at the Lyric with The Cocoanuts (book by George S. Kaufman, songs by Irving