Cats
Andrew Lloyd Webber's cat musical ran so long it stopped being a show and became furniture: the yellow cat's-eyes logo, the slogan "Now and Forever," and "Memory" belted from a junkyard set. It opened in 1981, but the 1990s are when it became the thing everyone had heard of — the tourist-Broadway default your parents took you to. In June 1997 it passed A Chorus Line to become the longest-running show in Broadway history, and its Broadway run closed in 2000 after 7,485 performances.