Belasco Theatre

The Belasco is one of Broadway's more intimate houses: just over 1,000 seats on West 44th Street, owned and run by the Shubert Organization since 1948. It has presented plays, revivals and musicals for more than a century.

The name honors David Belasco, the actor, playwright, director and producer for whom it was built as a personal playhouse. It first opened as the Stuyvesant, a tribute to Peter Stuyvesant, who ran the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam.

Belasco's Stuyvesant opened on October 16, 1907, with A Grand Army Man; Antoinette Perry, whose name the Tony Awards carry, was among the actors that night. After Belasco gave up an older 42nd Street playhouse that had carried his name, the Stuyvesant was renamed the Belasco on September 17, 1910. Across roughly two decades he produced or directed nearly 50 shows here, and from 1909 he lived upstairs in a duplex apartment filled with his collections.

After Belasco died in 1931, Katharine Cornell and her husband, Guthrie McClintic, leased the house. In 1935 the Group Theatre presented Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing! here, and Sidney Kingsley's Dead End, which opened that October, set a house record that held until 2026. The Shuberts took control in 1948, and NBC used the building for broadcasts from 1949. Live theater came back on November 5, 1953, with The Solid Gold Cadillac.

Later decades brought All the Way Home in 1960, a Pulitzer Prize for Drama winner; Al Pacino's Broadway debut in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? in 1969; The Rocky Horror Show in 1975; revivals by Tony Randall's National Actors Theatre from 1991; and the Broadway arrival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch in 2014.

The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission protected both the exterior and the interior on November 4, 1987. A restoration began in 2009, and the theater came back to life on October 2, 2010, with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. November 2019 brought its first film screening, Martin Scorsese's The Irishman. In July 2026, Maybe Happy Ending, which had opened here on November 12, 2024, overtook Dead End to set a new record for the theater. Backstage lore holds that Belasco's ghost appears in an empty box on opening nights.

George Keister gave the building a neo-Georgian design with the look of a townhouse. Belasco pictured his auditorium as a living room, in step with the Little Theater movement, which favored keeping the audience close to the actors. Outside, red brick laid in Flemish bond is trimmed with terracotta, and the asymmetrical upper stories carry Palladian windows and a brick pediment. This is Keister's earliest surviving theater; he went on to design 12 more, among them the Apollo in Harlem.

Inside, John Rapp designed the entrance lobby, Tiffany Studios made the light fixtures, Wilfred Buckland planned much of the color scheme, and Everett Shinn, a painter of the Ashcan School, supplied 18 murals. Overhead, 22 stained-glass ceiling panels glow with hidden lights, and above the stage opening a mural shows 29 pairs of figures standing for different emotions.

Belasco treated the place as a workshop for new staging and lighting ideas. An elevator stage could drop an entire set into the basement during a scene change, and a permanent board with 65 dimmers ran the lights. The 2009 to 2010 restoration cleaned the stained glass, brought Shinn's murals back and returned Tiffany-era fixtures from the Shubert Archive.

The main entrance has two small steps; a step-free side entrance is available if you ask staff on arrival. The building has no elevators or escalators. The orchestra is step-free, with eight wheelchair locations and transfer seats; the mezzanine is one flight of stairs up, and the balcony one more flight above that. A wheelchair-accessible restroom is available.

Induction loops serve hearing aids with a T-coil setting, and infrared listening devices and neck loops can be borrowed at the Shubert Audience Services kiosk. Closed captioning and audio description run through the GalaPro app or on borrowed handheld devices. Children under 4 are not admitted.