Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre

The Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre is a Broadway house on West 45th Street, owned and operated by the Shubert Organization. Its 1,079 seats sit on two levels, and it has housed both plays and musicals.

The building opened in 1917 as the Plymouth; in 2005 the Shuberts gave it the name of Gerald Schoenfeld, the company's chairman from 1972 to 2008. The Royale next door was renamed at the same time for Shubert president Bernard B. Jacobs.

The Shubert brothers built the Plymouth as a pair with the Broadhurst Theatre, which stands directly behind it to the south. The producer Arthur Hopkins leased the new house and picked its name. Its first audience arrived on October 10, 1917, for A Successful Calamity, a comedy transferred from the Booth Theatre.

Hopkins ran the theater until his death in 1950. In those years Alla Nazimova played Ibsen in repertory (1918), What Price Glory? reached 435 performances (1924), and two Pulitzer Prize winners opened here: Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), the Wilder play that starred Tallulah Bankhead. After that, the Shuberts ran the house themselves.

Between 1965 and 1970 the stage hosted a run of Neil Simon plays, beginning with the premiere of The Odd Couple, starring Walter Matthau and Art Carney; Plaza Suite (1968) logged 1,097 performances. Later highlights include Equus (1974), the Royal Shakespeare Company's eight-hour Nicholas Nickleby (1981), The Real Thing (1984), The Heidi Chronicles (1989) and Sondheim's Passion (1994). Jekyll & Hyde settled in from 1997 into 2001, for 1,543 performances, and a revival of A Chorus Line that opened in 2006 stayed for almost two years.

Come From Away arrived in 2017, went dark when the COVID-19 pandemic shut the theater on March 12, 2020, and came back on September 21, 2021. When it closed in October 2022 after 1,669 performances, it was the longest-running show in the theater's history.

The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission protected both the exterior and the auditorium in 1987. A lawsuit by theater owners, the Shuberts among them, against the designations of 22 houses failed in 1992. The interior was repainted and relit in 1982 and renovated again in 2014.

Herbert J. Krapp designed the Plymouth together with the Broadhurst as his first independent commissions. He went on to design almost every theater the Shuberts built after World War I.

The neoclassical front pairs buff brick, laid in Flemish bond, with a white terracotta frame above a granite base. The six-story stage house at the west end has diamond-patterned brick and an extra-tall door for scenery. At the east end the wall curves toward Broadway, where most theatergoers once came from, and a pediment over the corner doors marks the ticket lobby.

Inside, the room is broader than it is deep and finished in the Adam style. Plaster medallions show classical figures with musical instruments. The elliptical proscenium arch splays outward and carries a band of medallions and vines; above it rises a sounding board from which chandeliers hang. The ceiling border mixes cameo panels of Pan with sphinxes and urns.

The theater is not fully wheelchair accessible, but there are no steps from the sidewalk into the orchestra, where all seven wheelchair locations are found, along with the aisle seats that have folding armrests. The mezzanine is reached only by one flight of 31 stairs, with no elevator; its rows step down about two steps each, with handrails at the row ends. A wheelchair-accessible unisex restroom is on the main level, and the other restrooms are downstairs.

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, as are versions for your own phone; before that, live CART captioning is available on request with two weeks' notice.