Wrestling is Broadway. I hate to break it to the pundits, but there is little theatrical difference between Oklahoma with Crystal Bernard and The Rock at Madison Square Garden. Disney’s Lion King may have been put together by Julie Taymor with style and grace, but it’s (in the end) a light entertainment with great production values and music. Can anyone see the same thing in Christian’s entrance? There may be a slight quality difference in certain areas: but there is also more than a superficial difference between Les Miserables and a Neil Simon play.

I don’t know if I’m trying to knock Broadway down a peg, or give wrestling fans a big head. I think I’m just interested in telling the truth: but wrestling is, in fact, a far more pure form of theatre than many plays. Why?

The major difference (there are clearly others) between theater and it’s counterparts television and film is the audience. The live audience, the present human beings, watching, silently or otherwise, an actual event unfold before them. Wrestling, though, has evolved with it’s audience and contains elements designed only to elicit a VOCAL response from the crowd. It is theater like the circus is theater in that way…but stories, characters, and an internal language of symbols (ring announcers, ref bumps, kinds of moves) immerse the live audience in the staged events unfolding.

Sure, you can watch wrestling at home…but you can’t watch it being played out without an audience. The AWA (God rest its soul) staged a few matches during it’s Bischoff-era death-knell "The Team Challenge Series" and if anyone remembers…it was eerily like watching a rehearsal. Wrestling felt terribly empty and especially false without the audience to support it. Wrestling cannot be divorced from it’s audience. It has to be live.

The fact is…most theater is extremely satisfying in the way that wrestling is satisfying: it is a group experience, and as it’s live, the event can be played again…but not repeated or experienced the same way. There is something intangible and satisfying about it. While there are certainly forms of theater that surpass wrestling in…shall I stay…sheer aesthetics (acting, quality of writing, artifice)…wrestling is an extremely accessible, effective story, told athletically and to a broad audience. It certainly is comparable in many areas. All theater is different, and wrestling, for once and all, should be counted as a form of such.

Broadway is the most comparable, of course, because it is a "show." A big one. While there are two-character plays and one man shows on Broadway, it is mostly populated with stupid musicals (Mamma Mia!, the ABBA musical, is currently running at the Winter Garden) comedies (Noises Off! with Patti LuPone and Peter Gallagher) and other old standbys (the new Neil Simon, Chicago.) Are these truly great American art? Pop art at best. They are, in the end, no better or worse than wrestling is. Just a different and often vaguely less engaging form of entertainment.

Sure, theatre often rises above this (see Ian McKellan in Dance of Death) but you’ll find that in Black Boxes or in London. Wrestling has more in common with Miss Saigon than it does a Soap Opera on CBS.

Wrestling is Broadway. Or at least…it is theatre that has quite a bit in common with the American Musical and Broadway's basic principles. The next time you’re forced to read a play, or attend one…remember…as a wrestling fan, you’re already a theater fan. All it takes to make the leap from wrestling to the stage is an open mind.