Most of Broadway was operational on for matinees and evening shows Wednesday, Oct. 31 (save for Evita, Jersey Boys, Scandalous: The Life and Trials of Aimee Semple McPherson and Disney's The Lion King and Mary Poppins), but Tuesday, Oct. 29 was a dark day for all 28 musicals and plays on the Great White Way.

A city-ordered mass-transit shutdown starting Sunday evening prompted The Broadway League to cancel peformances scheduled for the nights of Sunday, Oct. 28, and Monday, Oct. 29, when only a handful of productions play. Performances on the busier Tuesday (when almost all of Broadway is usually lit up) were also cancelled.

Deadly Hurricane Sandy — downgraded to a tropical storm when it made landfall the evening of Monday, Oct. 29 — flooded subway tunnels and coastal neighborhoods of New York City and caused a massive blackout that, since Monday, left 250,000 people below 38th Street in the dark. The continuing blackout (as of noon Nov. 1) has blotted out many Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway productions.

Most tragic in this historic weather event, however, were the deaths of at least 25 people in the New York City area, and many more in neighboring states. Damage is in the billions of dollars, with losses particularly heavy on the southern New Jersey Shore, near Atlantic City.