Broadway shows under two hours

Which Broadway shows are short, or have no intermission?

Five Broadway productions currently run under two hours. Four of them — Oh, Mary!, SIX, School Girls, and Maybe Happy Ending — play straight through with no intermission, between eighty and a hundred minutes. The Rocky Horror Show runs an hour and fifty with one intermission. Everything else running on Broadway takes two hours or more.

Short Broadway shows are searched for by two different people who want opposite things. One has a train to catch, a dinner reservation, or a child whose limit is ninety minutes. The other has noticed that a show running straight through tends to be a different kind of evening — tighter, and harder to step out of.

Both are served by the same small list, because under two hours is genuinely rare on Broadway.

How short is short on Broadway?

Two hours thirty is the standard. Look at the runtimes across everything currently running and the musicals cluster tightly around it — The Lion King, The Book of Mormon, Hadestown and The Great Gatsby all land there, with Hamilton and Wicked at two forty-five.

Against that, the five below are outliers rather than a category. Four of them finish inside a hundred minutes.

Why do some shows have no intermission?

Because an intermission costs something dramatically, and for a short piece the cost outweighs the benefit.

A break resets an audience. Momentum built over the first act has to be rebuilt after it, which is a reasonable trade in a three-hour musical and a bad one in an eighty-minute comedy. It is also a structural admission — a show with an intermission is telling you it has two acts, and not everything does.

The practical argument runs the other way. An intermission sells drinks, gives the audience a restroom break in a building whose restrooms were designed in 1920, and lets the company reset backstage. A production that gives that up has decided the piece needs it.

Does a shorter show mean a cheaper ticket?

No. Broadway pricing tracks demand rather than duration, and Oh, Mary! has spent much of its run among the harder tickets in town at eighty minutes long. If anything the relationship runs backwards, because a short show can play more performances in a week.

Why the price is what it is has nothing to do with the clock — that mechanism is set out in why Broadway tickets cost what they do.

A note on previews

Productions in previews are left off this list deliberately. A show’s running time is not fixed until it opens, and cutting ten or fifteen minutes between the first preview and opening night is routine rather than exceptional — which is the whole point of the preview period, as described in previews, opening night, and press night.

A runtime published during previews is an estimate. This list waits.

What's on this list

How we chose

Broadway productions running as of the date below whose published running time — including intermission, where there is one — is under two hours. Running times are taken as the production and its ticketing partners publish them. Productions still in previews are excluded, because a show's running time is not settled until it opens and frequently shortens between the first preview and opening night.

Current as of October 14, 2026.

Oh, Mary!

Play · 2024

1 hour 20 minutes, no intermission, at the Lyceum Theatre. The shortest thing on Broadway alongside SIX and School Girls, and the clearest demonstration of why a single act suits a comedy — the premise would not survive being put down and picked up again fifteen minutes later.

SIX: The Musical

1 hour 20 minutes, no intermission, at the Lena Horne Theatre. Structured as a concert rather than a book musical, which is what lets it run straight through. Its final performance is announced for 3 January 2027.

School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play

1 hour 20 minutes, no intermission, at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. A transfer from off-Broadway, where it ran at the same length. Single-act plays of this size are the format Broadway houses increasingly use for a straight play.

Maybe Happy Ending

1 hour 40 minutes, no intermission, at the Belasco Theatre. The longest of the no-intermission group, and the one where the choice is most clearly dramatic rather than practical — the show is built as one continuous stretch of time.

The Rocky Horror Show

1 hour 50 minutes with one intermission, at Studio 54. The only production under two hours that still breaks, which is a reasonable trade in a house where the intermission is part of the event.

Sources