Prince of Wales Theatre seating capacity slightly to 1,160 seats and to modernise the theatre's facilities. New bars were added, the auditorium completely rebuilt, the backstage areas refurbished and the theatre's famous tower and exterior completely gutted and refurbished with new LED lighting and a crisp modern finish. The theatre re-opened with ABBA's musical "Mamma Mia!" on 16 April 2004. On 18 August 2007, "Mamma Mia!" became the longest-running show ever at the Prince of Wales, overtaking the previous record held by "Aspects of Love" with 1,326 performances at the venue and counting. The production marked another landmark on Thursday 23 August 2007, celebrating
Development of musical theatre expensive real estate prices, and did not arrive in the Times Square area until the 1920s and 1930s. Broadway's first "long-run" musical was a 50 performance hit called "The Elves" in 1857. New York runs continued to lag far behind those in London, but Laura Keene's "musical burletta" "Seven Sisters" (1860) shattered previous New York records with a run of 253 performances. Around 1850, the French composer Hervé was experimenting with a form of comic musical theatre that came to be called opérette. The best known composers of operetta were Jacques Offenbach from the 1850s to the 1870s and Johann