By the time Altar Boyz wraps up its run on January 10 with its 2032nd performance, it will have worked its way into the history books as the ninth longest Off-Broadway musical of all time! What other musicals have earned a place in the Off-Broadway hall of fame? As Time Square revelers are counting down the seconds to 2010, we’re counting down the ten continuously longest-running tuners in Off-Broadway history.

10) JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS
1,847 performances (1/22/68 - ?)
The tunes of French cabaret songwriter Jacques Brel were introduced to a wider audience in this hit revue from 1968, which played at the Village Gate at 158 Bleecker Street, now the site of (Le) Poisson Rouge, a multimedia performance space. Newly translated into English for American audiences, the show charmed theatregoers for over four years. The show was revived in 1974, 1992, and 2006, with slightly different tunestacks each time. The musical revue was transformed into a film in 1975.

9) ALTAR BOYZ
2,032 performances (3/1/05 – 1/10/10)
The undisputed hit of the inaugural New York Musical Theatre Festival in fall 2004, this musical about a Christian boy band (with a token Jew) saving souls one audience member at a time quickly transferred to Dodger Stages (since renamed New World Stages). The show’s catchy songs (by Gary Adler and Michael Patrick Walker) and canny book (by Kevin Del Aguila) successfully walked the delicate tightrope between sincerity and spoof.

8) GODSPELL
2,124 performances (5/17/71 – 6/13/76)
Well before he wrote Wicked, a young songwriter named Stephen Schwartz scored an unlikely 1971 success with a flower power-inspired take on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. Featuring such tunes as “All Good Gifts,” “Turn Back, O Man” and the top-40 pop hit “Day by Day,” the youthful cast (in clown makeup) enacted Biblical parables and the passion of Christ. After an initial run at the Cherry Lane Theatre and the Promenade Theatre (located on Broadway on the upper west side, now the site of a Sephora store), the production transferred to Broadway in 1976 where it played three more theatres before it finally folded fourteen months later, only to pop up again in thousands of local productions across America, as well as in Off-Broadway revivals in 1988 and 2000.

7) LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS
2,209 performances (7/27/82 – 11/1/87)
A musical about a man-eating plant based on a shlocky horror flick remembered primarily for its $30,000 budget and an early screen performance by Jack Nicholson?!?! Sounds crazy, no? But the gleeful musical adaptation of Roger Corman's B-movie delighted audiences for over six years at the Orpheum Theatre on 2nd Avenue (since 1994 the home of the Off-Broadway juggernaut Stomp). A film version followed in 1986 (with Ellen Greene reprising her stage role of the ditzy blonde ingenue, Audrey), as well as a ten-month-long Broadway revival in 2003. The show’s creators, composer Alan Menken and lyricist/bookwriter/director Howard Ashman went on to lead Disney’s film renaissance with their scores for the animated musicals The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. Ashman died of complications from AIDS at age 40 in 1991.

6) FORBIDDEN BROADWAY
2332 performances (5/4/82 – 8/30/87)
In 1981, out-of-work actor Gerard Alessandrini produced a cabaret showcase of the musical theatre parodies he’d been writing since he was a kid. Thanks to rave reviews, the revue transferred Off-Broadway where the show continued to skewer all things theatrical for years. The show regularly closed and re-opened to work in updated parodies and new material. All told, the various editions of the show (including holiday and Hollywood-themed versions) ran over 7,000 performances through March 2009. The show won a special Tony Award in 2006, one of only a few Off-Broadway shows to be so honored.

5) THE THREEPENNY OPERA
2,611 performances (9/20/55 – 12/17/61)
Four years after composer Kurt Weill’s death, Marc Blitzstein wrote a new English translation of Weill’s 1928 German-language masterpiece, the source of the hit song “Mack the Knife.” The new version opened at The Theatre de Lys (now the Lucille Lortel Theatre) in 1954, and due to popular demand, returned the following year for a six-year run, eventually outpacing the longest-running musical in American theatrical history up to that point, Oklahoma! Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya, received a Tony Award for her performance, the only time an Off-Broadway performance has received this prize. Threepenny was also the first Off-Broadway production to receive an original cast recording which also featured Bea Arthur and Jo Sullivan. Replacements included Ed Asner, Jerry Orbach, Charlotte Rae, Jerry Stiller, and over 700 others.

4) NAKED BOYS SINGING!
2,862 performances to date (7/22/99 – present)
The ultimate when it comes to truth in advertising, this light-hearted musical revue features 16 original songs, 8 gorgeous guys, and no clothing (one wonders, though: what exactly did costume designer Carl D. White do?). The show is currently celebrating its eleventh year of crooning songs like “The Bliss of a Bris,” “Perky Little Porn Star,” and “Nothin’ but the Radio on.” A film version of the musical was released in 2007. Curiously, the gay-themed show has become something of a bachelorette party sensation in recent years.

3) NUNSENSE
3,672 performances (12/12/85 – 10/16/94)
The third religion-themed show on this list is perhaps the most “habit-forming” of all, having been an Off-Broadway mainstay for nearly ten years. Dan Goggin’s musical featured five nuns putting on a variety show to raise funds to bury victims of a bad batch of vichyssoise soup brewed by Sister Julia, Child of God. The show has since been translated into 20 languages and has recieved over 5,000 productions worldwide. A sequel, Nunsense II: The Second Coming played briefly Off-Broadway in 1994, and author Dan Goggin has continued the franchise with Sister Mary Amnesia’s Country Western Jamboree, Nuncrackers (a holiday-themed sequel), Meshuggah-Nuns! (with a yiddish accent), Nunsensations! (set in Las Vegas), and the upcoming Nunset Boulevard. A drag revival of the original musical, retitled Nunsense A-Men! ran Off-Broadway for 231 performances in 1998.

2) I LOVE YOU, YOU’RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE
5,003 performances (8/1/96 – 7/27/08)
Though wags sometimes referred to this long-running musical as I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now CLOSE, the show’s run of over 5,000 performances bests such other well-known productions as Fiddler on the Roof, Miss Saigon and Grease, and ran over twice as long as The Producers. The good-natured revue, which the Star-Ledger called “’Seinfeld’ set to music,” celebrated the ups-and-downs of heterosexual dating. According to producers of the romantic musical, there were 61 wedding proposals at the show, all of which resulted in affirmative responses.

1) THE FANTASTICKS
17,162 performances (5/3/60 – 1/13/02)
Off-Broadway’s longest-running musical is also the world’s champion, running for an astonishing 41 years. The Fantasticks survived both the 1962-1963 newspaper strike as well as the pillaging and mayhem of the 1977's New York blackout, and the musical finally folded a few months after 2001 terrorist attacks. Over the years, the show's original 44 investors received a 19,465% return on their $16,500 total investment. The tender musical about love, loss, and growing up originally starred Jerry Orbach and Rita Gardner and features such now-classic songs by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt as “Try to Remember” and “Soon It’s Gonna Rain.” The show’s home during all five-plus decades, The Sullivan Street Playhouse, is unfortunately now the site of an upscale condominium. You can’t keep a good show down, though, and a revival of the evergreen musical opened in 2006 at Times Square’s Snapple Theater Center, where it continues to play to rapturous audiences. And so it goes…