If you wander through New York's Times Square Theater District today on most evenings around 6.30,

it's hard not to feel the excitement.

Excitement, yes, because the cultural life of the city is bounding back live and in-person after our period of quiet.

And it's that old excitement and anticipation that could never leave that fills the streets.

It's the excitement before the curtain rises on a Broadway show.

Titles of brand new Broadway shows light up the recently dark marquees and several of the

old standby shows that we hope will live forever are playing

to enthusiastic houses once again. And very shortly, we will see what today's theater community

chooses as the best of the best at the 2023 Tony Awards. But if we travel back in time to the

Gilded Age somewhere beginning in the 1870s and 1880s,

we'd find similarly excited crowds, but perhaps not quite yet at the center of it all,

what we know today as Times Square.

And if we ask a passer-by what their favorite Broadway musical is, they'd look at us a little

curiously. In the Gilded Age, Broadway was a street. Not yet an entire concept of extravagant

glittering spectacles on stage. But spectacles and stars there certainly were. And in this very special show

with a very special guest, we'll get a sense of just what Gilded Age audiences saw and where they

saw it when they went to the theater in the time of glitter and gold at a time before Broadway.

Hello, I'm Carl Raymond, the host of the Gilded Gentleman History podcast, where every two weeks we journey into corners light and dark for a look at America's

Gilded Age, France's Belle-Epoch, and England's late Victorian and Edwardian eras.

When the curtain rose at the Hudson Theatre on 44th Street on the night of February 11th, 2017,

a significant moment in Broadway theater history was being made. Perhaps many in the audience that night,

they were there to see a stunning revival of Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park

...