Al Hirschfeld Theatre

The Al Hirschfeld Theatre is a large Broadway house on West 45th Street, set a little apart from its neighbors: no other Broadway theater stands west of Eighth Avenue. ATG Entertainment owns and operates it, and over a century its stage has held plays like The Crucible and musicals from Bye Bye Birdie to Kinky Boots.

It opened as the Martin Beck Theatre, named for the vaudeville producer who built it. Since 2003 it has honored Al Hirschfeld, the caricaturist best remembered for his drawings of Broadway stars, the first visual artist to get a Broadway house named after him.

Beck had run the Orpheum Circuit and created the Palace Theatre before losing control of it. In 1923 he bought a row of houses on West 45th Street, cleared them and commissioned a playhouse of his own. It opened on November 11, 1924, with the operetta Madame Pompadour.

In its early decades the Beck was a base for serious companies. The Theatre Guild used it from 1928 to 1932, the Group Theatre staged its very first production here in 1931, and the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company brought Gilbert and Sullivan seasons in the 1930s. Arthur Miller's The Crucible played the house in 1953, and The Teahouse of the August Moon arrived that October for 1,027 performances.

Beck died in 1940, and his widow, Louise Heims Beck, kept the theater until 1966, when William L. McKnight of Jujamcyn Theaters bought it. Long runs that followed included Man of La Mancha from 1968, Dracula with Frank Langella in 1977, Into the Woods in 1987 and a Guys and Dolls revival from 1992 to 1995. In 1987 the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission protected both the exterior and the interior, and the courts upheld that decision in 1992.

Jujamcyn gave the theater its new name in June 2003, marking what would have been Hirschfeld's 100th birthday; he had died that January. After a renovation, the house came back on November 23, 2003, with Wonderful Town. Kinky Boots opened in April 2013 and gave 2,507 performances over six years, and Moulin Rouge! followed in 2019, closing in August 2026 after 2,297 performances. In 2023 Jujamcyn merged with Ambassador Theatre Group.

The architect, G. Albert Lansburgh of San Francisco, had been chief architect of the Orpheum Circuit and mostly designed movie palaces. The Beck was the one big theater he built in New York, and he considered it his finest. While Broadway houses of the day leaned neoclassical, he went Moorish and Byzantine, a style no other Broadway theater uses.

Outside, a two-story arcade of 11 arches on eight-sided stone columns with carved capitals runs along the sidewalk under red brick, giving the street wall a depth the flat fronts nearby lack. The old name, Martin Beck Theatre, is still lettered above the box office window.

Much of the interior decoration was the work of the muralist Albert Herter. The ticket lobby is vaulted in Guastavino tile, and the tall inner lobby rises to three painted domes. In the auditorium, plaster fan vaults frame the boxes, and an octagonal ceiling holds a round wooden dome painted in red, yellow and green, with a painted-glass chandelier at its center. The 2003 renovation added a marquee lit with Hirschfeld's own Self-Portrait as an Inkwell and 22 copies of his drawings in the mezzanine lounge.

You can go from the street into the orchestra without a single step, and every wheelchair, companion and aisle-transfer location is on that level. The mezzanine takes 20 steps from the orchestra, seven more to its entrance and 28 more to the top rows, all with handrails; the building has no elevator. A single-stall, all-gender accessible restroom is on the orchestra level.

Free assistive devices can be borrowed from a booth in the lobby corridor: audio description and captioning units, neck loops and infrared listening headsets. A free phone app also offers captions in seven languages, among them Spanish, Japanese and Korean.