1,486 shows opened on Broadway and in the West End in the 1930s.

Life With Father opened November 8, 1939 at Empire Theatre and ran 3,224 performances, the longest run to open in the 1930s.

Anything Goes: The standard story says a shipwreck plot got rewritten after the real Morro Castle disaster killed over a hundred people days before rehearsals. But producer Vinton Freedley had already rejected the script three weeks earlier, calling it tasteless. A separate, more radical account says the script never had a shipwreck plot to begin with — the real subplot involved a bomb at sea, and director Howard Lindsay's own account says that plot, plus the real disaster, is what got it cut. (George Eells's Cole Porter biography and Miles Kreuger's liner notes, cited in Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings; the bomb-plot account is Ethan Mordden's, in Anything Goes: A History of American Musical Theatre)

New Faces: Henry Fonda and Imogene Coca both made their Broadway debuts in this revue. (Stanley Green & Cary Ginell, Broadway Musicals, Show By Show)

Revenge With Music: Libby Holman returned to Broadway in this show after the death of her husband, tobacco heir Zachary Smith Reynolds — under a cloud of tabloid notoriety Steven Suskin calls, in his own word, “scandalous.” (Steven Suskin, Show Tunes)

Four Saints in Three Acts: Composer Virgil Thomson cast an all-Black company for an opera with no Black characters, saying he chose them “for their strong voices” and their innate understanding of the libretto. (Dan Dietz, The Complete Book of 1950s Broadway Musicals)

The Children's Hour: Hellman based the play on a real 19th-century Edinburgh court case: two schoolteachers whose careers and lives were destroyed after they were accurately identified as lesbian, though they had done nothing wrong under the law. In the real case, no one died. Hellman invented the play's suicide ending herself. (Lillian Faderman, Scotch Verdict (1983), cited in Boze Hadleigh, Broadway Babylon)

They Shall Not Die: John Wexley's play dramatized the Scottsboro Boys case — nine Black teenagers framed on a rape charge and sentenced to death — while the case was still working through the courts. (McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama)