Broadway In Chicago

A Nederlander company, formed in July 2000

Broadway In Chicago was formed in July 2000 by the Nederlander Organization, and still trades as a Nederlander company. Its business is two-sided: it books touring Broadway product into the Loop, and it runs the buildings that product plays in. Those are the CIBC Theatre on West Monroe, the James M. Nederlander Theatre and the Cadillac Palace on West Randolph, the Auditorium on Ida B. Wells Drive, and the Broadway Playhouse at Water Tower Place on East Chestnut.

The company puts annual attendance across the five houses at well over 1.7 million. The wider figures it circulates — more than 6.5 million admissions since 2001, around 7,500 jobs, roughly $635 million a year in economic activity, some 500,000 hotel room nights, 42 per cent of the audience travelling in from out of state — are the organisation's own numbers rather than independently audited ones, and are worth reading as advocacy. The underlying point is harder to argue with: for a touring musical, Chicago is the largest single commercial market between the coasts, and one operator controls the doors.

The buildings came long before the company

Every venue in the portfolio predates the presenter by decades. The CIBC opened on New Year's Day 1906 as the Majestic, the first Chicago theatre to cost more than a million dollars to build. The Auditorium, Adler and Sullivan's 1889 building, is older still. The Cadillac Palace opened on 4 October 1926 at Randolph and LaSalle, designed by the Rapp brothers, who had opened the Oriental at 24 West Randolph a few months earlier, on 8 May 1926.

The Oriental's later history explains a lot about how the district works. It went on the National Register in 1978, closed to the public in 1981, and sat dark until Mayor Richard M. Daley's 1996 push to bring live theatre back to Randolph Street. Restoration finished in October 1998 and the house reopened with the Chicago premiere of Ragtime, trading as the Ford Center for the Performing Arts before taking the name James M. Nederlander in February 2019. The Broadway Playhouse, the small room in the group at 560 seats, joined in April 2010.

Tryouts, sit-downs and the Hamilton years

Two kinds of booking have defined the company's first quarter-century. The first is the pre-Broadway tryout: The Producers, Spamalot and The Devil Wears Prada came through the portfolio, and the Nederlander alone has hosted world premieres of The Addams Family, Big Fish and The SpongeBob Musical. Chicago functions as the out-of-town workshop where a show's second act gets rewritten in front of paying customers.

The second is the open-ended sit-down, where a touring title stops touring and simply moves in. Wicked held the Oriental stage for three and a half years; Billy Elliot followed. The high-water mark was Hamilton, which occupied the CIBC from 2016 to 2020 and played 1,341 performances to more than 2.6 million people — a longer local life than most shows manage anywhere outside New York.

2026: a Hamilton return, then a season announced in March

Hamilton came back to the CIBC this year, running through 26 April 2026 — the show's first Chicago engagement since the sit-down ended. The return was a consequence of national politics rather than routine routing: the production had cancelled a Kennedy Center run after President Trump removed board members there, and Chicago picked up the slack. Chicago Sun-Times reporting on 10 March 2026 found an audience split between repeat customers, including one on a twenty-third viewing, and younger ticket-buyers who had only ever seen the Disney+ film, with several saying the material's arguments about immigration and empire landed differently now.

The 2026-27 subscription season was announced on 23 March 2026: six titles, packages from $205, savings advertised at up to 38 per cent against single tickets, and public sale from 8 April. The line-up runs Jekyll & Hyde from 8 September, Dirty Dancing: The Musical from 9 September, Operation Mincemeat from 29 September, Jersey Boys from 10 November, Maybe Happy Ending from 5 January 2027 and Oh, Mary! from 19 January 2027.

Away from the booking sheet, president and chief executive Lou Raizin has been pushing a downtown recovery scheme he calls the Cultural Stadium — floating stages on the river, market barges, public artwork wedged into the gaps — which he described to ABC7 on 23 February 2025 as a way of "plugging culture in, everywhere we can plug it in", at a funding scale he compared to Millennium Park. Nothing has been built.

A 120-seat show moved into a 560-seat house

The most interesting thing on the company's stages this month is not a tour. Kokandy Productions, a storefront outfit founded in 2012 and based at the Chopin Theatre in Wicker Park, staged Jekyll & Hyde there in 2025 — the Frank Wildhorn and Leslie Bricusse musical's first Chicago production in more than fifteen years. It sold out, extended, and collected ten Jeff Award nominations. Broadway In Chicago then put it in the subscription season, which is an unusual direction of travel: a nonprofit storefront production promoted into a commercial downtown house, with the original cast and creative team intact.

The transfer opened at the Broadway Playhouse on 8 September 2026, directed by Derek Van Barham with music direction by Nick Sula and choreography by Brenda Didier, and starring David Moreland as Jekyll and Hyde, Ava Lane Stovall as Lucy Harris and Emily McCormick as Emma Carew. It was scheduled to 25 October; by 15 September it had already been extended to 8 November.

The company has reached into the local nonprofit scene before — New City noted on 9 September 2026 that Porchlight and TimeLine have both worked with the commercial presenter — but the scale jump here is stark. Stovall put it plainly: the Chopin held about 120 people at a squeeze, the Playhouse holds 560. Moreland described the adjustment as working out what is achievable across an eight-performance week after a four-performance one. Van Barham's fix for the wider, shallower stage is architectural: windows cut into the set so the audience can still see through to the band, which is now spread out rather than stacked behind the action.

The rest of the diary

The calendar behind the subscription six is dense and mostly short-stay. Waitress takes the Nederlander for 13-18 October, The Book of Mormon returns to the Cadillac Palace 23 October to 1 November, and the holiday block is stacked: Blue Man Group's seasonal show at the CIBC from 24 November, The Hip Hop Nutcracker and Mrs. Doubtfire the same week, Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas at the Nederlander 9-27 December, Potted Potter at the Playhouse into January. Further out sit The Who's Tommy in February 2027, The Bodyguard in April, Disney's The Lion King at the Cadillac Palace for two months from 3 June 2027, Heathers in June and The Princess Bride across July and August.

Alongside the commercial slate the company runs the Illinois High School Musical Theatre Awards and an Emerging Theatre Award for local companies — the same pipeline logic that produced the Kokandy transfer, formalised.