Lunt-Fontanne Theatre

The Lunt-Fontanne Theatre is a large Broadway house on West 46th Street near Times Square, with 1,505 seats on two levels. The Nederlander Organization has run it since 1973 as one of its nine Broadway theaters. Built as the Globe, it took its present name in 1958 to honor Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, the married acting team who starred in its reopening; photographs from their own collection hang in the lobby areas. Children under five are not admitted.

The producer Charles Dillingham built the Globe as a stage for his musical comedies and a home for his offices, naming it after Shakespeare's playhouse in London. It opened on January 10, 1910, with The Old Town, starring Dave Montgomery and Fred Stone. For about two decades the Globe served mainly musical comedies and revues: Irving Berlin supplied a ragtime score for a 1915 show, three editions of George White's Scandals carried scores by George Gershwin, and No, No, Nanette arrived in 1925. The first straight play, The Harp of Life in 1916, featured a young Lynn Fontanne.

The Depression ended that era. After The Cat and the Fiddle in 1931, the Globe switched to films in 1932, and Dillingham went bankrupt the next year. In 1957 an investor group called City Playhouses bought it to bring it back to live theater, rebuilt the interior and reopened on May 5, 1958, with The Visit, the last Broadway appearance of Lunt and Fontanne. The Sound of Music, starring Mary Martin, played here from 1959 to 1962. Richard Burton's Hamlet (1964), Sophisticated Ladies (1981) and the Tony Awards ceremonies of 1989 and 1990 came later.

The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission protected the facade on December 8, 1987, but not the rebuilt interior; a court challenge by theater owners failed in 1992. Beauty and the Beast moved in from the Palace Theatre in 1999 and stayed until 2007, the longest stay in the building as of October 2026. Later tenants included The Little Mermaid, Motown: The Musical, Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, which reopened the house on October 8, 2021, after the pandemic shutdown, and a 2023 revival of Sweeney Todd.

Carrère and Hastings, the firm behind the New York Public Library, designed the Globe in the Beaux-Arts manner, and it is the only one of the firm's four New York theaters still standing. The 46th Street front, once the carriage entrance, is broader than it is high. Over a rusticated stone base with arched doorways, five tall arched windows between Ionic pilasters fill the center, with a wrought-iron railing along the second-floor terrace. Look up for the sculpture: figures holding the masks of comedy and tragedy, caryatids beside the top windows and carved heads over the doors, some calm and some snarling.

The 1910 auditorium had two balconies, 12 boxes and an oval ceiling panel meant to open in good weather beneath a movable roof so the audience could see the sky, although a historian found no record of it ever being used. For the 1958 reopening, the firm of Roche and Roche gutted that room, sealed the old entrance on Broadway and built a one-balcony house in an 18th-century spirit, with a sunburst curtain and Edward Melcarth's ceiling mural of theatrical muses among clouds.

The building has neither elevators nor escalators, so step-free seats exist only in the orchestra, where wheelchair locations can be booked with up to three companions. Some aisle seats have folding armrests for transfers, staff can escort guests from the lobby, and an accessible restroom is on the orchestra level. Free assistive listening headsets and an induction loop for telecoil hearing aids are available. Captions and audio description run through the GalaPro app or handheld I-Caption devices, usually from about a month after a show opens; performances are not interpreted in sign language. In 2014 the Nederlanders agreed with the US Department of Justice to improve access at their Broadway theaters.