Barrymore Theatre

The Barrymore Theatre is a Shubert Organization house on West 47th Street with 1,058 seats on two levels. It has served as a legitimate playhouse, staging plays and musicals, ever since it opened in 1928. Many listings use the full name, Ethel Barrymore Theatre, while the marquee shows only the surname.

It honors Ethel Barrymore (1879–1959), a stage star from the acting Barrymores. Lee Shubert and J.J. Shubert built it for her, and it was the last theater the brothers put up. No other house they built for a performer under their management survives, and this one has kept the same owner and namesake since it opened. The city has landmarked its facade and its auditorium.

In 1927, playwright Zoe Akins brought Barrymore a proposal from the Shuberts: a theater bearing her name if she let the brothers manage her career. A star since 1901 under producer Charles Frohman, she agreed. Construction began in spring 1928 and ran late, so her opening play, The Kingdom of God by G. Martinez Sierra, toured for several weeks before the theater opened on December 20, 1928.

The partnership ended in 1932, when Barrymore left Shubert management and her first name came off the marquee. Her final appearance here was An International Incident in 1940, and the lights were dimmed for her when she died in June 1959.

Fred Astaire headlined Gay Divorce, with songs by Cole Porter, in 1932. Clare Boothe Luce's The Women (1936) ran 657 performances, Gene Kelly starred in Rodgers and Hart's Pal Joey (1940), and Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy opened A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams in 1947. Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun arrived in 1959 with Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee, and August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone followed in 1988. As of October 2026, the longest run in the house belongs to I Love My Wife, which played here from 1977 to 1979.

Later decades added Tony-winning revivals of Company (2006), Death of a Salesman (2012) and A Raisin in the Sun (2014), plus the Tony winners The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2014–2016) and The Band's Visit (2017–2019). Shut by the pandemic on March 12, 2020, the theater reopened in September 2021 with Waitress. Joe Turner's Come and Gone returned in a 2026 revival.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission held its first hearing in June 1982 and designated the facade on November 4, 1987, and the interior on November 10, 1987. Theater owners fought the designations in court from 1988, and they were upheld in 1992. The Shuberts restored the house in the late 1980s, renovated it in 2004 and finished a two-year exterior project in 2008.

The architect was Herbert J. Krapp, who drew nearly every Shubert theater after World War I and more Broadway houses than anyone else. At street level, a Beaux-Arts base of rusticated terracotta, painted to look like limestone, frames two arched entrances and a smaller center door; the marquee hangs from bronze brackets that once held glass-and-bronze canopies. Higher up, white glazed brick surrounds a two-story terracotta lattice that borrows the windowed walls of Roman public baths, its top curving like a proscenium.

Inside, Elizabethan, Mediterranean and Adam motifs meet in low plaster relief. The boxes, three per side and about 9 feet above the orchestra floor, stand against gold fluted pilasters under a sunburst of concentric arches, topped by a lunette with two sphinxes. A coved ceiling rises to a dome 36 feet across, hung with a glass chandelier.

As of October 2026, the owner describes the theater as wheelchair accessible. The orchestra has step-free access and holds all wheelchair seating. There is no elevator: the mezzanine is three flights up (30 steps). One unisex accessible restroom is on the main floor; the others are two flights down (20 steps).

Infrared assistive listening devices are offered at every performance. From four weeks after a show's official opening, handheld audio description and captioning devices are free; before then, live CART captioning can be requested two weeks ahead. A Shubert Audience Services kiosk is staffed at every performance.