My 20 favorite Broadway musicals

• Show Boat - 1927
  • Kern and Hammerstein
• Porgy and Bess - 1935
  • Gershwin, Heyward, and Gershwin
• Oklahoma! - 1943
  • Rodgers and Hammerstein
• On the Town - 1944
  • Bernstein, Comden, and Green
• Carousel - 1945
  • Rodgers and Hammerstein
• Kiss Me, Kate - 1948 - Tony Win for Best Musical (1949 was the first year of the Tony awards)
  • Porter, Spewack, and Spewack
• Guys and Dolls - 1950 - Tony Win for Best Musical
  • Loesser, Swerling, and Burrows
• The Music Man - 1957 - Tony Win for Best Musical
  • Meredith Willson
• West Side Story - 1957 - Tony nomination for Best Musical
  • Laurents, Bernstein, and Sondheim
• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum - 1962 - Tony Win for Best Musical
  • Sondheim, Shevelove, and Gelbart
• Fiddler on the Roof - 1964 - Tony Win for Best Musical
  • Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joseph Stein
• Man of La Mancha - 1965 - Tony Win for Best Musical
  • Wasserman, Darion, and Leigh
• Jesus Christ Superstar - 1970 - 5 Tony nominations, but none for Best Musical
  • Webber and Rice
• Annie - 1977 - Tony Win for Best Musical
  • Charles Strouse, Martin Charnin, and Thomas Meehan
• Les Misérables - 1980 - Tony Win for Best Musical
  • Schönberg, Boublil, Natel, and Kretzmer
• The Phantom of the Opera - 1986 - Tony Win for Best Musical
  • Webber, Charles Hart, and Stilgoe
• Urinetown - 2001 - Tony nomination for Best Musical
  • Hollmann and Kotis
• Wicked - 2003 - Tony nomination for Best Musical
  • Schwartz and Holzman
• Curtains - 2006 - Tony nomination for Best Musical
  • Holmes, Kander, and Ebb
    
• Hadestown - 2016 - Tony Win for Best Musical
  • Anaïs Mitchell

Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II gets three mentions. Four others are tied with two each:

• Leonard Bernstein
• Richard Rodgers
• Stephen Sondheim
• Andrew Lloyd Weber

Bernstein, Rodgers, and Weber are composers. Sondheim is a double threat, with multiple credits as a lyricist and composer.

I've included at least one production from almost every decade for the past century. There's nothing from the 1990s - none that I saw called out to me.

Nine from my list were first staged during the so-called "Golden Age" of American Musical Theater, often cited as 1943-1965. I first heard these when I was in single digits - my mom played them on our phonograph. Her favorite was Brigadoon.