The 10 Longest-Running Broadway Shows Still Playing

Bea, hosting. Longevity lists are 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 — the countdown.

How this list is ranked — the criteria, in plain words: Ranked by total Broadway performances, most at No. 1, for productions still playing — every show here appears in the Broadway League's current weekly table (week ending November 1, 2026). Performance counts are as of November 1, 2026, from Playbill's longest-running shows list, whose figures come from the Broadway League; Playbill's totals don't include preview performances, and neither do ours. Opening dates and theatres are from the Internet Broadway Database (IBDB, the League's own database) and the same League-sourced record. One framing fact before the countdown: the all-time leader, The Phantom of the Opera, closed in 2023 with 13,981 performances — it's the ghost at this feast, mentioned for scale and not ranked, because it isn't still playing.

The countdown, from No. 10 to No. 1

10. MJ — 1,981 performances (opened February 1, 2022, Neil Simon Theatre) The youngest show on this list, in its fifth year and closing in on two thousand performances. The modern Broadway economy gives a show no decade to grow: it arrives hot or it doesn't arrive. MJ arrived hot and hasn't cooled.

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.

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 the Walter Kerr's size is part of the secret: scarcity keeps the flame lit.

7. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child — 2,812 performances (opened April 22, 2018, Lyric Theatre) The only straight play on this list, 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. 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 filled every seat at the Rodgers 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. 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 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, and the Genie still stops the show. Longevity isn't always loud.

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 Wicked is 21 performances shy of nine thousand as of November 1 — it'll cross within days of this list printing. Its 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. 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 is 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, 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.