Big-name cast replacements, including Cyd Charisse and Zina Bethune, helped the show become the first American musical since 1985's Big River to top 1,000 performances on Broadway.

Menschen im Hotel marked the beginning of the career of popular Austrian novelist Baum in 1929 and she dramatized her novel for the Berlin stage later in the same year.

After the play became a hit, its English-language adaptation enjoyed success in New York in the early 1930s and was made into the blockbuster 1932 Academy Award-winning film, Grand Hotel, starring Greta Garbo, John Barrymore and Joan Crawford.

[2] Davis, Wright, and Forrest first adapted Baum's story in 1958 under the title At the Grand, changing the setting from 1928 Berlin to contemporary Rome and transforming the ballerina into an opera singer closely resembling Maria Callas to accommodate Joan Diener, who was scheduled to star under the direction of her husband Albert Marre.

During the Boston run in 1989, Wright and Forrest acquiesced when Tune requested Maury Yeston, with whom he had worked in Nine, be brought in to contribute fresh material.

Ballroom choreography was by Pierre Dulaine and Yvonne Marceau, who played The Gigolo and The Countess in the show, and as a favor to Tune, Thommie Walsh choreographed a brief dance section in "I Want to Go to Hollywood".

Baron Felix Von Gaigern, young, good-looking, and destitute, uses his charisma to help him secure a room in the overbooked hotel while stiffing a tough gangster who pretends to be a chauffeur.

Jewish bookkeeper Otto Kringelein, who is fatally ill, wants to spend his life's savings to live his final days at the hotel in the lap of luxury.

Meanwhile, Hermann Preysing, the general manager of a failing textile mill, hears that the merger with a Boston company is off, spelling financial ruin; he does not want to lie to his stockholders but gives in to the pressure.

[citation needed] The original cast included Liliane Montevecchi as Elizaveta, David Carroll as the Baron, Michael Jeter as Otto, Jane Krakowski as Flaemmchen, Tim Jerome as Preysing, John Wylie as Otternschlag, and Bob Stillman as Erik.

Replacements later in the run included Zina Bethune and Cyd Charisse (in her Broadway debut at age 70) as Elizaveta, Rex Smith, Brent Barrett, John Schneider, and Walter Willison as the Baron, and Chip Zien and Austin Pendleton as Kringelein.

[5] The cast album features a bonus track of Carroll's performance during a 1991 cabaret fundraiser for Equity Fights AIDS, singing the Baron's song, "Love Can't Happen".

[citation needed] In 2004, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio starred as Elizaveta in a small-scale production directed by Michael Grandage at the Donmar Warehouse, garnering an Olivier Award for Best Musical Revival.

[7] Willison starred alongside fellow Broadway cast members Montevecchi, Barrett, Jerome, as well as Karen Akers, Ben George, Ken Jennings, Hal Robinson and Chip Zien.