On the heels of its most lucrative season yet, with a record-setting $1.37bn in ticket sales, Broadway has experienced something of a rebirth. From the success of La La Land on the big screen to Hamilton on stage, there’s a renewed interest in theater that’s been reflected in a wave of movie-musicals and televised live-concert experiences.

All of this seems, to entertainment industry insiders, like the chorus following a crescendo, with theatergoers re-energized and Hollywood producers awakened, again, to the crossover potential and creative possibilities of stage work. “I think the snowball has been building for a long time,” said Megan Kingery, a co-producer on the Tony award-winning hit musical Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.

Hamilton is often credited as the driving force of this trend; Lin-Manuel Miranda’s bold blend of American history and hip-hop proved not just remarkably soluble, but also commercially viable, scoring a Broadway record in November for the most lucrative week ever, with $3m earned from just eight performances. Tickets for the show, which opened last month in LA and is coming to London, can cost upwards of $500. But despite what looks like a rapid ascent, there are no overnight successes, especially in theater.

Richard Kraft, the creative director and producer of Disney’s La La Land in Concert at the Hollywood Bowl, believes the pop culture climate has warmed to musicals at just the right moment. “We have an entire generation that grew up watching Disney animated musicals,” he said. “They have no problem with the notion that a character breaks into song to express their feelings. All we needed were a few good movies or stage shows.”

Glee: one of the shows that’s to blame for the resurgence of musicals. Photograph: Contract Number (Programme)/Fox Broadcasting

“Shows like Glee, Empire, and Nashville, movies like Pitch Perfect and the Step Up franchise, even America’s Got Talent and American Idol, have brought a musical sensibility to more mainstream entertainment that’s reminded people how much they love people singing,” adds Kingery.

This year, studios and streaming services have sought to capitalize on this rebirth. Damien Chazelle, whose movie musical La La Land played no small part in this trend, has sold an eight-episode musical mini-series called The Eddy to Netflix. It’s Chazelle’s first foray into television and Netflix’s first venture into original musicals. Hugh Jackman, who sang his heart out in the film adaptation of Les Misérables, will helm the PT Barnum-inspired movie-musical The Greatest Showman in December. And the cross-genre embrace cuts both ways.

“For too long, musicals were living in this specialty category,” Kraft explains. “We went through a period where musicals were living in their own bubble and something like Hamilton came along; a subject matter no one would think of, an approach no one would think of, done in a manner that was universally powerful.”

The success of Hamilton has emboldened producers to try their hands at projects that might seem ill-suited for the stage. This spring, a musical version of the 2004 film Mean Girls, with a book penned by Tina Fey, will hit Broadway. And just a few months before, this December, the SpongeBob SquarePants musical, with songwriting contributions from Cyndi Lauper, Sara Bareilles, John Legend and David Bowie, will begin its first engagement in New York. But capitalizing on the familiar hasn’t always been a successful strategy for theater; the recent adaptation of American Psycho failed in New York and it remains a difficult task to corral financing for smaller shows that lack star power.

“It may become harder to get financing of an obscure little work that doesn’t have any names attached to it or any commercial upside, but that’s always been a struggle,” Kraft says. “But it’s a more exciting time simply because people who are great in one field are willing to take the adventure of doing something for the stage.”

Typical Broadway distribution and revenue models – “put a show in a theater and have people come see it,” Kingery says – have also been subverted and accelerated in the process. NBC and Fox have announced plans to bring Bye Bye Birdie and A Christmas Story, respectively, to the stage for live concert experiences, and Kraft’s La La Land in Concert, which premiered just months after the film’s release, has plans to tour the UK, Canada, Mexico, Turkey, Italy and Switzerland.

“There’s now potential for streaming live productions, which is a conversation that’s been accelerated,” Kingery says. “There’s also the possibility for tours to start happening sooner than they might have in the past. It used to be that you would do a show and, if it was a hit, you might record a cast album. Now we’re seeing the potential for the cast album to be not just a marketing tool, but also a revenue source earlier in the process.”

Top of the class: Mean Girls. Photograph: Allstar/PARAMOUNT/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

And while Broadway has always been a source of rich material for film-makers, Hollywood’s newfound willingness to appropriate theatrical works for its own purposes has, in turn, lured film talent to the stage.

“The talent pool who consider themselves as Broadway performers has always been very narrow, but those walls are coming down,” said Kraft. “I have composers who have never thought of Broadway thinking, ‘Oh, what about doing that?’ All of a sudden, it’s no longer just a few blocks of New York and a little incestuous group of people making the same art over and over.”

This enmeshing of theater and film has also been a boon for those who typically do stage work, too, making it easier to find work and sustain themselves.

“The knowledge that you can make more money in Hollywood than you can in theater is not newly occurring to people,” Kingery says. “But there are more opportunities for composers and a greater pool of talent that’s writing and working all the time that you can draw on. So if there’s other media opportunities that can provide them with a way to stick around and stay writing, that only helps theater in the long run.”

As long as the broad talent pools of Broadway and Hollywood continue their mutual embrace, Kingery and Kraft think this trend is sustainable, not least for the performers, writers, and composers who now attract the interests of Hollywood studio executives.

“A rising tide raises all ships,” Kingery says. “Raising investment for theater has always been, and remains, a challenge. But one of the things that Hollywood financing allows theater to do is also to support the talent that goes into writing musicals. It takes years and years of dedication with very little financial reward.

“But we’re like a bad boy band,” she adds. “Nobody ever really goes away.”

