Comic-Con 2026 drew 250,000 attendees to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, and Broadway had a bigger footprint than a casual fan convention slot usually gets. Bryan Campione, a Playbill moderator, was on the floor for a Schmigadoon! panel that put stage crossover programming inside North America’s most attended fan convention.
Schmigadoon! with Bryan Campione
Five names drove the Schmigadoon! panel: Cinco Paul, Alex Brightman, Ann Harada, Max Clayton, and Campione as moderator. The conversation centered on bringing Schmigadoon! from screen to Broadway and on the 2026 Best Musical Tony winning show’s path to the stage.
That kind of panel works differently from a standard promotional stop. It asks a Broadway audience to measure the material as a production pipeline, not just as a title on a marquee, and it gave attendees a direct look at how the show was shaped for the stage rather than only for the screen.
Phantom and Maybe Happy Ending
One panel marked The Phantom of the Opera’s 40th Anniversary under the MASQUERADE banner, with Richie Ridge moderating and Kyle Scatliffe, Kaley Ann Voorhees, and Cesar Hawas taking part. Another panel, Building a Maybe Happy Ending, brought together Will Aronson, Dane Laffrey, Clint Ramos, and Marcus Choi to discuss writing, scenic design, costume choices, and the technical work behind the show’s futuristic world.
The Maybe Happy Ending discussion also folded in AAPI culture, which gave the panel a more specific creative frame than a generic title tease. For readers tracking Broadway’s presence inside NYCC, the point is scale as much as access: these were not isolated cameo appearances, but structured conversations built around the work itself.
Four days, 650 exhibitors
The four-day convention also featured The Rocky Horror Show on Broadway, with Raven Snook moderating and Jake Shears appearing as Frank-N-Furter. Across the event, New York Comic Con was reported at 250,000 attendees, with over 650 exhibitors and 500+ creators in the building.
That attendance figure was described as both projected and reported, which leaves the cleanest read on the event as a scale story rather than a final audited tally. Even so, the mix of Broadway panels and a convention floor that large means the programming was built to reach far beyond theater regulars.
What still matters most is the imbalance between the broad headline number and the missing panel-by-panel turnout. The total crowd was huge, but the record does not say which Broadway panel pulled the biggest audience, and that is the number readers would want before judging which title actually broke through.
