YALL

Uh, no. It is because theater superstition says that it is bad luck to wish someone good luck, so you wish for something bad to happen instead, and that way the performance will go well. We theater folk are a highly superstitious lot.

Actually it's the German misunderstanding of hatslokhe u broke, which is Yiddish for "good luck", but the Germans understood "Hals- und Beinbruch", which roughly translates to "break the neck and a leg"

I'm currently a theatre arts major and I've been doing theatre for well over a decade and I can confirm that it does come from superstition. Theatre has sooooo many superstitions and that's just one of the most popular. The whole break a leg = hope you get in the cast, is purely coincidental. But also it's pretty clever.

Hello. Professional stage manager/technical director here. So way back in the day, performers only got paid if they made it on stage. (Acts were so disorganized that not every piece would always get to perform). Saying ‘break a leg’ refers to hoping they break the threshold of the ‘wings’ (theatre term for backstage) which are defined by the curtains called ‘legs’. Over time, superstitions about ‘good luck’ have formed, but it was originally about getting paid for your act actually performing

This contains 100% genuine bullshit, made up from the textbook definitions of "cast" (to throw something) and "cast" (a mould). Also, I'm pretty sure that when the term "break a leg" came up, "the cast" were simply referred to as "the players"...