It is not often that the very best of something is defined by a place.  The best science in America could be at any number of hospitals, universities, or research facilities the world over.  The best cooking in the country is claimed by thousands of restaurants.  The best athletics are as diversely argued as the sports themselves are diversely contested.  But ask anyone where, in this grand land, he or she can find the very best in professional theater and one answer will always fall from his or her lips.
 
Broadway.
 
The Mecca of musicals.  The seventh heaven of stage.  Broadway is where the stars shine, perhaps not brightest, but longest.  They flash in brilliant, dynamic glory for a packed house, over and over and over again.  They're crowd pleasers, breath takers, and money makers.  Broadway makes billions, and it's so eminently established that anything wishing to compete in a more intimate, avant-garde sort of way must refer to themselves as "Off-Broadway."
 
Broadway gave and gives us everything from the very best to the dearly beloved.  It gave us Roxie Hart and the "Cell Block Tango" from Chicago.  It gave Maria a voice and all of us "Favorite Things" in The Sound of Music.  It took animated classics like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King and made them into musical marvels.  It took a poem by T.S. Eliot and made it into the Rum Tum Tugger, Old Deuteronomy, and Grizabella, just a few of several Cats that would go on to enjoy the second longest run in Broadway history.  And of course, the reign supreme goes to masked terror whose "Music of the Night" lures Christine Daaé into the lair of the Phantom of the Opera.
 
Critics will pat themselves on the back for calling it the theater of the masses.  They will circle like carrion buzzards over the popular choice.  But one by one, they will starve themselves out of our memory.  For the theater feeds us and we feed it, and all of us feast on Broadway.