Broadhurst Theatre

The Broadhurst Theatre is a Broadway house of 1,186 seats on West 44th Street, owned and run by the Shubert Organization. Its stage has held musicals, revues, dramas and comedies.

The name honors George Broadhurst (1866–1952), an Anglo-American playwright and manager. He leased the building from the Shuberts in August 1917, before it opened, as a stage for his own work. The name has never changed. Shubert house rules do not admit children under four.

The first production, on September 27, 1917, was Misalliance, a play by George Bernard Shaw that ran for 52 performances. The Shuberts, for whom the theater was built, took over its operation from Broadhurst in 1929 and bought the land beneath it from the Astor family in 1948.

Its bookings since then read like a short course in Broadway history. In 1935 The Petrified Forest paired Leslie Howard with Humphrey Bogart, while Helen Hayes headlined Victoria Regina; she came back for Happy Birthday in 1946. Auntie Mame, starring Rosalind Russell, ran 639 performances from 1956, and in 1959 the house welcomed Fiorello!, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick. John Kander and Fred Ebb's Cabaret began here in 1966 before moving on.

Neil Simon plays staged here include The Sunshine Boys (1972), Broadway Bound (1986) and Rumors (1988). Later decades brought Chita Rivera in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993, 906 performances), Fosse (1999), Tom Hanks's Broadway debut in Nora Ephron's Lucky Guy (2013), the final stretch of Mamma Mia! (2013–2015) and Anastasia (2017–2019).

The house was dark for about six months in 1984 and 1985 while Johansen-Bhavnani rebuilt the stage, refreshed the lobby and enlarged the lounge and restrooms. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission protected the facade on November 10, 1987, and the auditorium on December 15, 1987. A 1988 lawsuit by the Shuberts, the Nederlanders and Jujamcyn against the designation of 22 theaters, this one included, failed in 1992.

Herbert J. Krapp designed the Broadhurst together with its neighbor directly to the north, the Plymouth, known today as the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre. They were his first theaters as an independent architect, and he went on to design almost every playhouse the Shuberts built after World War I. The twins look much alike outside and opened less than two weeks apart, but their interiors differ.

The neoclassical front gets most of its decoration from the brick itself: buff brick in a diaper pattern above a granite base, with terracotta trim and iron fire-escape galleries. The east end curves around the corner toward Broadway, where most audiences came from, and its entrance sits under a broken pediment.

Inside, Krapp chose Adamesque ornament, rooted in the designs of Robert Adam, the 18th-century English architect, and mixed it with Greek motifs. Doric columns and pilasters frame the boxes and the flat proscenium arch. Relief panels modeled on the Parthenon's Panathenaic frieze, with riders on horseback, sit above the stage and on the box fronts; light boxes hide most of the section on the balcony front. Chandeliers hang from medallions in the flat ceiling. The original plan could also shrink the orchestra from 680 to 550 seats for farces.

No steps separate the sidewalk from the theater, and every part of the orchestra, including the six wheelchair locations, can be reached without steps; 13 aisle seats have transfer armrests. The mezzanine is a flight up and there is no elevator. A unisex accessible restroom is on the main floor, and the other restrooms are downstairs.

Infrared assistive listening devices are offered at every performance. From four weeks after a show's official opening, hand-held audio description and captioning devices are free; earlier, live CART captioning can be booked with two weeks' notice. A Shubert Audience Services kiosk is set up at each performance.