Booth Theatre

The Booth Theatre is a compact Broadway house, built for plays that benefit from an audience close to the stage. It stands at 222 West 45th Street, beside Shubert Alley, and The Shubert Organization owns and operates it. In the 2010s it mostly booked straight plays.

Its namesake is Edwin Booth (1833–1893), the 19th-century American actor and brother of John Wilkes Booth. Booth had built his own Booth's Theatre on 23rd Street in 1869, so this is the second New York stage named for him. Producer Winthrop Ames chose the name because his father had once worked for Booth there.

In April 1912 Ames, a champion of intimate stages, and Lee Shubert leased Astor family land for two theaters built back to back: the larger Shubert facing 44th Street and the smaller Booth facing 45th. During planning the Booth was called the Ames Theatre and then the Gotham. A flooded basement delayed the debut by six days, to October 16, 1913, when Arnold Bennett's The Great Adventure had its American premiere.

Ames managed the theater, often with work he produced himself, until 1932. The Shuberts then took charge and bought the land in 1948.

Pulitzer winners staged here include You Can't Take It with You (1936), William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life (1939) and Jason Miller's That Championship Season (1972). Two musicals that opened at the Booth earned the same prize: Sunday in the Park with George (1984), by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, and Next to Normal (2009), by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey, honored in 2010. Once on This Island (1990) was the Broadway debut of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty.

Long runs include Butterflies Are Free (1969, 1,128 performances), Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1976) and The Elephant Man (1979, 916 performances). Kimberly Akimbo played from November 2022 to April 2024 and won five Tony Awards in 2023, including Best Musical.

Its facade and interior became New York City landmarks on November 4, 1987, and a court challenge by the Shubert, Nederlander and Jujamcyn organizations ended with the designations upheld in 1992. Dark from March 12, 2020, during the pandemic, the Booth returned on October 7, 2021, with Freestyle Love Supreme.

Henry B. Herts, earlier of Herts & Tallant (the Lyceum, the New Amsterdam), designed the Booth and the Shubert as a matched pair. The exterior follows Italian Renaissance precedent in white brick, terracotta and stucco. Look for the sgraffito, patterns hand-incised into the stucco, light gray on a purple-gray ground. With the Shubert's, it is among the last surviving examples of the technique in New York City. A rounded corner bay holds entrance doors, and the cornice brackets are shaped like theatrical masks.

The inner lobby displays a copy of the Edwin Booth bust kept at The Players club. The auditorium blends English Tudor-Jacobean design with classical detail. Wood paneling, which Ames had seen improve the sound at Leipzig's Gewandhaus, covers roughly two-thirds of the wall height. Higher up, each side wall has three casement windows in elliptical arches, an unusual sight on Broadway. An elliptical proscenium frames the stage, and chandeliers of brass and crystal hang from the coved plaster ceiling.

The 1913 palette was gray and mulberry, with Booth's armchair and playbills on display. In 1979 designer Melanie Kahane restored the original design in three weeks, using beige and brown, and three old dressing rooms became the One Shubert Alley shop.

The Booth is only partly wheelchair accessible, with no elevator or escalator. The orchestra is step-free and holds all wheelchair spaces, and row L has aisle seats with folding armrests. The mezzanine is two flights up (31 steps), with about two steps per row and handrails at row ends. An accessible unisex restroom is on the orchestra level; the others are in the basement.

Infrared assistive listening devices are offered at every performance. Once a show has been officially open for four weeks, handheld audio description and captioning devices are free, and both can be downloaded to your own device; earlier, live CART captioning can be requested two weeks ahead. Shubert Audience Services staffs a kiosk at every performance. Children under four are not admitted.