Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre

The Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre is a mid-sized Broadway house on West 45th Street, owned and run by the Shubert Organization. It has hosted plays and musicals alike, and for most of its life it was called the Royale. The name now honors Bernard B. Jacobs (1916–1996), president of the Shubert Organization from 1972 to 1996. It stands on the block with more Broadway theaters than any other.

Irwin S. Chanin and his brother built the theater in 1926 and 1927 as the middle sibling of a trio. The large Majestic and the small Theatre Masque, now the John Golden Theatre, rose alongside it, together with the Lincoln Hotel, today the Row NYC Hotel. Planned for musical comedies and about 1,200 seats, the Royale opened ahead of its two siblings on January 11, 1927, with Piggy, a musical comedy later retitled I Told You So.

Shubert management arrived in 1930, and producer John Golden later leased the house and put his own name on it in 1934. After a 1936 auction the Shuberts regained control, and CBS used the stage for radio broadcasts from 1937 to 1940. Back under the Royale name, it reopened on October 21, 1940, with the Cole Porter musical Du Barry Was a Lady, and the Shuberts took full ownership in 1945.

Mae West's Diamond Lil (1928) was the first big hit. Julie Andrews first appeared on Broadway here in The Boy Friend (1954), and Cactus Flower, opening in 1965, ran 1,234 performances. Grease, a 1972 transfer from the Broadhurst, played here until 1980, passing Fiddler on the Roof to become Broadway's longest-running show up to then. Bernadette Peters won a Tony Award for Song and Dance (1985), and later Tony winners included God of Carnage (2009), Once (2012 to 2015) and a 2015 revival of The Color Purple.

The Shuberts restored the house during the 1980s, and on December 15, 1987, the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission protected the exterior and the interior alike. The Shuberts joined other owners in suing over the designations, which the courts upheld in 1992. The Shubert board approved the new name in 2004, and the marquee changed on May 9, 2005, when the neighboring Plymouth also became the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre.

Herbert J. Krapp, who designed more Broadway houses than any other architect, drew all the Chanin theaters in a style he and Chanin called Spanish modern. The street front rises from rusticated terra-cotta to upper walls of golden Roman brick, five tall arched windows and a rounded pediment. The narrower stage house to the east has a fifth-story loggia of paired columns under a Spanish tile roof, matching one on the Golden.

Chanin, who as a poor student had been sent through a separate door to cheap gallery seats, wanted every patron to use the same entrance, and he gave the house a single big balcony where most theaters of the day had two. Roman Melzer, a former architect to Czar Nicholas II, designed the interior; Joseph Dujat made the plasterwork; and Willy Pogany painted Lovers of Spain, two murals in arches on the side walls, each showing a woman amid a procession of musicians.

A groin-vaulted ceiling spans the room, and the original palette was red, orange and gold. The boxes beside the elliptical proscenium bear griffins and shields, with brass chandeliers above them.

The theater is not fully wheelchair accessible. The orchestra is reachable without steps and holds the wheelchair and companion locations, as well as aisle seats with folding armrests. The mezzanine is up three short flights (29 steps), with about two steps per row and handrails at row ends; there is no elevator or escalator. A wheelchair-accessible unisex restroom is on the orchestra level, and the women's room is downstairs.

Infrared assistive listening devices are offered at every performance. From four weeks after a show's official opening, free hand-held audio description and captioning devices are available, plus downloadable versions for your own device; before then, live CART captioning can be requested two weeks ahead. For help with these devices, there is a Shubert Audience Services kiosk during each performance.