42nd Street is a musical with a book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble, lyrics by Al Dubin, and music by Harry Warren. The 1980 Broadway production won the Tony Award for Best Musical and became a long-running hit, and the show was produced in London in 1984 (winning the Olivier Award for Best Musical) and its 2001 Broadway revival also won the Tony for Best Revival. The show is frequently revived.

Based on the novel by Bradford Ropes and the subsequent 1933 film adaptation, it focuses on the efforts of famed dictatorial Great White Way director Julian Marsh to mount a successful stage production of a musical extravaganza at the height of the Great Depression.

The fact that prior to this the only movie musical adapted for the stage had been the 1974 flop Gigi did not deter producer David Merrick from taking a gamble with a $3 million production. He felt audiences once again were ready to embrace the nostalgia craze started by the successful revivals of No, No Nanette, Irene, and his own Very Good Eddie several years earlier, and augmented the familiar songs from the film's soundtrack with a liberal dose of popular tunes from the Dubin-Warren catalogue. Taking his cue from Hollywood's Busby Berkeley, famed for his elaborate musical numbers, director/choreographer Gower Champion filled the stage with spectacular dance routines, starting with forty pairs of feet tap-dancing away as the curtain slowly rose for the first act as they did at that time.