Playbill

Playbill is an American monthly magazine for theatergoers. Although there is a subscription issue available for home delivery, most copies of Playbill are printed for particular productions and distributed at the door as the show's program. Playbill was first printed in 1884 for a single theater on 21st Street in New York City. The magazine is now used at nearly every Broadway theatre, as well as many Off-Broadway productions. Outside New York City, Playbill is used at theaters throughout the United States. As of September 2012, its circulation was 4,073,680. What is known today as Playbill started in 1884, when Frank Vance Strauss founded the New York Theatre Program Corporation specializing in printing theater programs. Strauss reimagined the concept of a theater program, making advertisements a standard feature and thus transforming what was then a leaflet into a fully designed magazine. The new format proved popular with theatergoers, who started to collect playbills as souvenirs; however, the name (The) Playbill did not appear until the 1930s while earlier programs published by the company simply bore the name of the venue. In 1918, Frank Vance Strauss sold the company to his nephew, Richard M. Huber. From 1918 onward, the company started printing playbills for all of Broadway and by 1924, was printing 16,000,000 programs for over 60 theaters. The 1920s also saw attempts to introduce consistency in the design with the covers of the magazines featuring artwork representing the theater, which would stay the same from show to show. In 1934-35, the name The Playbill made its first appearance on the cover although there was still no standard logo in that period. The design underwent a series of transformations with show titles occasionally switching places with The Playbill logo in various places on the cover until the magazine's logo found its permanent place at the top of the front cover and the publication as it is known today became Playbill in 1957, under then-owner Gilman Kraft.