Broadway: Pippin (10 times) Matilda In The Heights (4 times) Act One Peter and the Star catcher Mamma Mia (2 times) Hot Feet Cabaret (2 times) Hair (2 times) Catch Me If You Can Hairspray The Lion King Wicked Billy Elliot (2 times) Cinderella Newsies The Little Mermaid Beauty and the Beast Bye Bye BIrdie The Addams Family How to Succeed... Mary Poppins Finian's Rainbow 13 How the Grinch Stole X-mass Slava's Snow Show
Off Broadway: Avenue Q Blue Man Group Slava's Snow Show
Paper Mill Playhouse: A Chorus Line Hairspray
West End: Billy Elliot The Wizard of oz
planning on seeing: If/Then Beautiful: The Carol King Musical
I started keeping a spreadsheet in 2008, but the only way for me to count before that is to count up my Playbills, though I know there are some I don't still have.
My total would be 481, most of those within the last 9 years.
I'm at 320 Broadway, 116 for Off-Broadway (and regional theater like Steppenwolf and the 5th Avenue), and probably around 35 operas at the Met. This is in just under 10 years of theater going.
I work in a small regional hybrid-equity pro theatre, and I'm twenty-four, about to turn twenty-five. I estimate that I've seen maybe a hundred professional shows overall, but that I've been in about 125, not counting school or community theatre.
Funny that you should ask this, because I actually catalog all of this information. I have seen 317 professional plays or musicals (also including Cirque du Soleil, Blue Man Group, Fuerza Bruta, and Stomp) for the past 16 years.
Anything regarding shows stated by this account is an attempt to convey opinion and not fact.
My wife and I live in the suburbs of New York City and travel into the city to see a show (mostly Broadway, but also some off and off-off Broadway) an average of once a month. We've been together almost 26 years, so that would put the total number of shows I've seen with my wife at approximately 312. Then including other shows I've attended with just friends or myself, the number would climb to approximately 320. I am 57 years old, but did not attend any professional theater until my wife introduced me to it.
I do have an extensive collection of playbills from shows I've seen, but taking the time to go through these computations was pretty interesting and somewhat enlightening.
I've seen 73 professional productions (I just did a rough count but I'm sure I'm missing some shows). Those are spread out between Broadway, Toronto, and the West End with no duplicates included.
Not to worry, dramamama, you are but a slip of a girl to some of us.
I saw my first professional production in 1966 and we didn't have personal computers on which to keep easy spreadsheets. (Yes, namo, I suppose I could have kept a journal; we had that technology.)
But, then, I never intended to see 60. I'm at that annoying point where my husband and I disagree as to which shows we actually saw (and when and where and with whom); we try not to bicker in front of others.