Giacomo Puccini Because only three "verismo" works by Puccini continue to appear regularly on stage (the aforementioned "Cavalleria rusticana", "Pagliacci", and "Andrea Chénier"), Puccini's contribution has had lasting significance to the genre. Both during his lifetime and in posterity, Puccini's success outstripped other Italian opera composers of his time, and he has been matched in this regard by only a handful of composers in the entire history of opera. Eleven of Puccini's operas are numbered among the 200 most-performed operas (worldwide, by composers of any nationality, as surveyed by Operabase). Three of his works ("La bohème", "Tosca", and "Madama Butterfly") rank among
Musical theatre box office successes, with the notable exceptions of "Fiddler on the Roof", "Cabaret" and "Grease". The 1980s saw the influence of European "mega-musicals", or "pop operas", on Broadway, in the West End and elsewhere. These typically featured a pop-influenced score, had large casts and sets and were identified by their notable effects – a falling chandelier (in "The Phantom of the Opera"), a helicopter landing on stage (in "Miss Saigon") – and big budgets. Many were based on novels or other works of literature. The most important writers of mega-musicals include the French team of Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil,