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Contact (musical)

musical

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 27, 2026
Entity authorityQ5164799 ↗
Source-derived summary

Contact is a musical "dance play" that was developed by Susan Stroman and John Weidman, with its "book" by Weidman and both choreography and direction by Stroman. It ran both Off-Broadway and on Broadway in 1999–2002. It consists of three separate one-act dance plays.

Productions

Contact premiered at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, on September 9, 1999 (after 1999 workshop productions of parts of the show), then moved to Broadway at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Lincoln Center, on March 30, 2000, and played for 1,010 performances there.

The show was received with critical acclaim and won the 2000 Tony Award for Best Musical (among others). The award was controversial because Contact contains no original music or live singing, and in response, a new award for Best Special Theatrical Event was introduced the following year.

A West End production opened at the Queen's Theatre in October 2002, and closed on May 10, 2003. The

musical toured from May 2001 to June 2002, and started again in November 2002 in Toronto.

The original cast album was released on March 6, 2001. PBS included the show's final performance in its program Live from Lincoln Center on September 1, 2002.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Contact (musical)” is musical. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Contact and musical, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1999, 2002, 2000, 2003—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Contact and musical is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “musical” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5164799. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2002, 2000 and 2003.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Contact (musical) primary sources, Contact (musical) archive and Contact research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Contact (musical)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.