Is Broadway necessary? As the focus for new writing and major experimental work in the USA shifts ever further from the old theatre district around Times Square – first to off- and then to off-off-Broadway, more recently to the flourishing regional theatres – many critics have come to regard Broadway either as an economic anachronism, failing to perpetuate past glories, or simply as an irrelevance to ‘real’ theatre. Yet Stanley Kauffmann argues that a focal point for a nation's theatre is more than the sum of sometimes fraying parts, and works on the imagination in ways that cannot be evaluated by the fragmentary assessment of succeeding productions; and here he analyses the ‘organism’ that Broadway remains, and the function it performs. Stanley Kauffmann has been theatre critic for the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Saturday Review, while the most recent of his full-length works is Theater Criticisms (1984).