Greatest advance sales for a musical

The highest earnings from tickets sold in advance of a show’s opening night is $36 m (£20.2 m), achieved by the original Broadway production of Miss Saigon, produced by Cameron Mackintosh, in the months leading up to its opening on 11 April 1991.

The show, which is based on the 1904 opera Madama Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini, has music composed by Claude-Michel Schönberg and book and lyrics by Alain Boublil and Richard Maltby Jr. It had been a huge success following its West End debut in 1989, and its 1991 arrival at the Broadway Theatre in New York was expected to be the theatrical event of the year. Its profile was increased further by a long-running and extremely public dispute between producer Cameron Mackintosh and the Actors’ Equity Association, a union representing performers on Broadway. The focus of the dispute was the casting of British actor Jonathan Pryce as The Engineer, a French-Vietnamese character.

The closest any subsequent production has come to this figure is $32 m, earned by Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton in the run up to its 2015 Broadway debut at the Richard Rodgers Theatre.