Imperial Theatre

The Imperial Theatre is a Shubert Organization house on West 45th Street, built in 1923 for musicals and known ever since for long-running ones. It was the 50th venue the Shubert brothers built around New York, meant to replace the Lyric Theatre, an aging house they had leased since 1903.

The name was settled only weeks before opening night. Lee Shubert had turned down producer Arthur Hammerstein, who wanted it named for his late father, Oscar Hammerstein I. As at other Shubert theaters, children under four are not admitted.

The first curtain went up on December 25, 1923, on Mary Jane McKane, a musical co-written by Oscar Hammerstein II that ran 151 performances. The next year Rudolf Friml's operetta Rose-Marie passed 500 performances, and its profits helped pay for Hammerstein's Theatre, a memorial to Oscar Hammerstein I.

Cole Porter scored Jubilee (1935) and Leave It to Me! (1938), in which Mary Martin made her Broadway debut. Four Irving Berlin shows played here, among them Annie Get Your Gun (1946), a 1,147-performance hit starring Ethel Merman; she returned for Call Me Madam in 1950 and Gypsy in 1960. In 1952 Wish You Were Here put a working swimming pool on stage. After a Depression-era receivership, the building passed through two other owners in 1940 and 1941 before the Shuberts regained it by 1956.

Oliver! had its Broadway premiere here in 1963, and Fiddler on the Roof opened in 1964 with Zero Mostel and stayed nearly three years. Pippin (1972), with Ben Vereen, played here for more than four years. Neil Simon's Chapter Two (1977) set the house record for a play at 857 performances, and Dreamgirls (1981) logged 1,522. The Tony Awards ceremony was held here in 1973 and 1982.

Les Misérables moved in from the Broadway Theatre in 1990 and stayed until it closed in 2003 after 6,680 Broadway performances, by then the second-longest run in Broadway history. Billy Elliot the Musical, winner of the Tony Award for Best Musical, opened in 2008. The COVID-19 pandemic shut the theater on March 12, 2020; it reopened on October 16, 2021, with Ain't Too Proud. Chess, which played here in 1988, returned in 2025 for a revival that closed in June 2026.

The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission protected the interior, though not the exterior, on November 17, 1987. A lawsuit by the Shuberts and other owners against that round of designations failed in 1992.

Herbert J. Krapp, who drew nearly every theater the Shuberts put up after World War I, worked with a T-shaped lot. The auditorium faces West 46th Street, while the 45th Street address is a slim three-story front of white terracotta, set between the Music Box and the Klaw Theatre, since demolished; a long passage leads from it to the back of the orchestra. The wide 46th Street side, in buff brick laid in a diaper pattern, served as the carriage entrance. Both fronts are plain; the ornament is inside.

Krapp used the Adam style, named for the 18th-century British architects Robert and James Adam: low-relief plaster with floral and geometric bands, dancing figures on the balcony walls and, above each group of three boxes, winged figures holding the masks of comedy and tragedy. A curved sounding board with a lattice panel crowns the flat proscenium arch, and ribs with round medallions cross the shallow ceiling. The broad, shallow hall keeps most seats fairly close to the stage.

The entrance from the sidewalk has no steps, and the whole orchestra, including five wheelchair locations and aisle seats with folding armrests, can be reached without stairs. There is no elevator, so the mezzanine is stairs only. A unisex accessible restroom is on the main level; the other restrooms are one flight up.

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; before that, live CART captioning can be booked two weeks ahead.