Lyceum Theatre

The Lyceum Theatre (say ly-SEE-um) is a 922-seat playhouse at 149 West 45th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. It opened in 1903, and no Broadway house has been in continuous use for live theater longer. A smaller house by Broadway standards, it has hosted premieres, revivals and resident repertory troupes. The Shubert Organization has owned and operated it since 1950.

Producer Daniel Frohman built it for drawing-room comedy, sure that a small room suited the newer, more natural acting. He named it after the Lyceum he had run on Fourth Avenue, razed in 1902 for the Metropolitan Life tower; it opened as the New Lyceum.

Frohman picked a quieter side street near the subway line then being built. Work began on April 1, 1902, and he had 13 bricks from the old house set into the new one, a number he considered lucky. E. H. Sothern starred in The Proud Prince on opening night, November 2, 1903, and on November 17 William Gillette gave American audiences their first look at J. M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton.

Frohman lived upstairs, in a penthouse with a small opening onto the stage; the story goes that he waved a handkerchief through it when his wife, Margaret Illington, overplayed a scene. Charles Frohman was the first manager. After he died on the Lusitania in 1915, David Belasco joined the management in 1916 and stayed until his death in 1931.

Foreclosure proceedings began in 1935, and by 1939 the building faced demolition. In 1940 a syndicate including George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart and Max Gordon bought it, and Frohman kept his rooms upstairs until he died that December. The longest run followed: Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday, with Judy Holliday, opened in 1946 and played 1,642 performances.

The Shubert years brought new British plays: Look Back in Anger by John Osborne (1957), A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney (1960) and The Caretaker by Harold Pinter (1961). The APA-Phoenix Repertory Company was resident from 1965 to 1969, and Tony Randall's National Actors Theatre for much of the 1990s. Later bookings include the Pulitzer and Tony winner I Am My Own Wife (2003), The Scottsboro Boys (2010) by Kander and Ebb, a Tony-winning A View from the Bridge revival (2015), The Play That Goes Wrong (2017) and A Strange Loop (2022).

The facade became a city landmark in 1974, the lobby and auditorium in 1987; a lawsuit by the big theater owners failed to overturn this in 1992. Closed by the pandemic on March 12, 2020, it reopened on October 11, 2021.

The Beaux-Arts design is by Herts & Tallant, the Paris-trained partners Henry Beaumont Herts and Hugh Tallant. The gray limestone front has a rusticated base, three arched doors under a curving iron-and-glass canopy (a 1986 replica of the original), six fluted columns framing tall arched windows, and a frieze of carved comedy and tragedy masks. Four large urns on the roof burned gas at night to draw eyes to a theater on a side street.

The lobby pairs a vaulted ceiling and central dome with Maryland marble meant to evoke Athens, a mosaic L monogram underfoot, twin curving staircases and murals by James Wall Finn of Sarah Siddons and David Garrick.

The auditorium is wider than deep, bringing seats close to the stage, and its cantilevered balconies, a technique Herts developed, need no columns to block the view. Plain walls leave the ornament to the boxes and the proscenium, topped by Pallas Athene with figures of music and drama. There is no central chandelier; small lights hide in the ceiling panels. Frohman's apartment has held the Shubert Archive since 1986.

Wheelchair access is partial. The entrance and the whole orchestra, wheelchair spaces included, are step-free. Aisle seats with folding armrests are in orchestra rows L and N. With no elevator, the mezzanine is two flights up and the balcony four. An accessible restroom is available, and the ticket-lobby water fountain sits at 36 inches.

Every performance offers infrared listening devices. Once a show has been open four weeks, captioning and audio description are free on handheld devices or your own phone; before then, CART captioning can be booked two weeks ahead. A Shubert Audience Services kiosk is staffed at each show. Children under four are not admitted.