Broadway Shows Play Weeks of Previews Before Opening Night, and the Show Can Change Every One of Them. Here Is What "Frozen" Means.

A Broadway show freezes when the creative team stops changing it. The version on stage on the freeze night becomes the version critics review and the version that opens, and the weeks before that night carry a name of their own: previews, the paid public performances a show plays while the team can still cut a scene in the afternoon and restore a different one by curtain. Frozen means no more changes, and previews mean every change still counts as fair game.

Previews are full public performances, and the team can still change the show the next day

Almost all Broadway shows get a pre-opening test run called previews, a time-honored custom in most professional theatres, per Playbill's explainer. A preview audience buys a real performance — full set, full costumes, orchestra in the pit, the show played start to finish — and buys a work in progress in the same transaction. The cast and creative team test-drive the production in front of live audiences in the evening and rehearse and make changes during the day, so a Tuesday crowd and a Friday crowd can watch two measurably different shows under the same title.

The run gives directors and designers room to fine-tune a vision and actors room to hone a performance against real laughter, real silence and real applause. Once opening night arrives, Playbill's explainer puts the result plainly: the material stands fully resolved, the performance sits locked — frozen, in the industry's word — and the critics can share their reviews.

A typical Broadway preview run lasts two to six weeks and averages about 30 performances

Playbill's range runs from two to six weeks, usually averaging to approximately 30 preview performances. The short end has a famous casualty: the 1966 musical Breakfast at Tiffany's played four previews total and never opened. One recent transfer skipped the process almost entirely. Illinoise made its first Broadway performance its opening night — pretty unusual today, per Playbill — so the musical could make 2024 Tony eligibility after a direct transfer from an Off-Broadway run.

The long end holds the record. Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark played a record 183 previews before opening, per Playbill's explainer, after postponements, injuries, a hiatus and a change of director. Most productions live between the extremes: roughly a month of evenings for strangers, with the rehearsal room running in daylight.

The Broadway League's season statistics count the whole stretch. The League notes that its performance numbers include previews, while new productions count in the season of official opening — so a show can bank weeks of previews in one season and open formally in the next.

A director can move a chair a dozen times and a composer can replace a song mid-previews

The scale of preview change runs from a word to a world. Stage plays often take script rewrites that stay minor — word changes, sentence revisions — or run major, with complete scenes added or cut. Lighting design shifts through the process. Costumes change, sometimes completely, when a designer decides a piece clashes with the lighting or moves badly on a body in motion. Musicals add the sound mix on top: amplified voices balanced against an orchestra, plus choreography drilled until the spacing holds.

At the smallest end, Playbill records a single chair crossing a stage. Moving a chair from one side of the stage to the other can get readjusted a dozen times before a director feels satisfied enough to freeze the choice. At the largest end sits a song the canon now treats as inevitable. Stephen Sondheim wrote "Last Midnight" while Into the Woods was midway through previews. The new song replaced a shorter ditty called "Boom Crunch," kept some of the older lyrics, built a stronger melodic climb and landed as a bona fide 11 o'clock number — the late-show solo that stops the evening — in front of preview audiences first.

Technology gives the weeks a second job. Modern Broadway productions carry intricate soundscapes, specialized lighting systems, automated scenic design and ample projections, alongside complex cable systems, motors and electronic control software. Previews let the team prove each system runs smoothly and safely with a house full of people watching the proof.

Preview audiences tell the creative team which laughs land and which scenes run long

A rehearsal studio holds no strangers, and strangers supply the data a preview run exists to collect. Playbill calls a preview audience part of the show's honorary creative team, and the record supports the credit. During Aladdin's 2013 tryout in Toronto, negative reviews led the team to overhaul several elements before Broadway. Company cycled through finale songs during its pre-Broadway tryout before settling on "Being Alive," the ending audiences now treat as the only possible one.

Tryouts are the older form of the same tool. New plays and musicals historically played pre-Broadway runs in Boston, Chicago, New Haven, Seattle, San Diego and Washington, D.C., honing the work before New York critics took their seats. Playbill notes the internet has weakened the protection a tryout once afforded a production, and the long multi-city tryout has grown rarer; the Broadway preview period now does most of that work inside the show's own theatre.

The audience gets something for its labor. Preview tickets typically run cheaper than post-opening tickets, Playbill notes, especially once a show becomes a hit, and a preview crowd sees a version of the production that may vanish by the weekend. A long-running show can play for years, tour and return in revivals; only its preview audiences ever saw the early shape of the piece.

Producers freeze the show in the final week of previews so critics can review the finished version

Playbill's second explainer states the freeze rule in one breath: scenes get dropped, lines change and songs arrive — almost anything counts as fair game until the show freezes shortly before opening night, and a frozen show takes no more changes. The timing follows the critics' calendar. A show typically stands set by the final week of previews, so reviewers now attend during that final week rather than on opening night itself. The arrangement hands critics days to consider a production before the reviews publish on opening night, and opening night sheds some of its verdict-night weight and becomes a party celebrating the feat.

Spider-Man shows the mechanics at full stretch. The June 8, 2011 evening performance at the Foxwoods Theatre was the musical's 177th preview, and Playbill reported the night as the last one on which changes would land. The production stood frozen from that performance onward, critics took invitations for June 9 through 11, and the show officially opened on June 14.

The anecdote the trade keeps for the whole period belongs to Ethel Merman. Frustrated by the volume of changes arriving on a production, Merman declared herself "Miss Birds Eye" — the frozen food brand — and wished at least her own performance could stay unchanged. The joke lands because everybody in her audience knew the underlying rule: until the freeze arrives, nothing on the stage carries a guarantee, not the chair, not the song, not the star.

A frozen show can change after opening night, but the trade treats the move as an exception

Frozen locks the version critics review and the version that opens, and the lock normally holds for the run. Normally does the work in that sentence. Playbill's history of post-opening revamps records Cirque du Soleil's Paramour taking four performances off, weeks after opening night, to make creative changes — a direct buck against the tradition. Camelot's team went further in 1961: months into the run, the creators combined scenes and cut two entire songs, "Take Me to the Fair" and "Fie on Goodness," bringing the running time down by about 12 minutes.

Exceptions prove the shape of the custom rather than breaking the definition. A change after opening needs new rehearsals or a hiatus, and the trade covers each case as news precisely because the freeze was supposed to end the tinkering. Inside previews, change counts as the job description. After the freeze, change counts as a story — and a reader who spots a "frozen" announcement in the trades now holds the whole translation: the arguing has stopped, the critics are coming, and the show on the boards is the show that opens.