Majestic Theatre

Built for big musicals and still used mostly for them, the Majestic is among the largest houses on Broadway. It stands on West 44th Street, on the Theater District block with more Broadway stages than any other, and the Shubert Organization operates it.

Irwin S. Chanin and his brother Henry I. Chanin built it as the biggest of three theaters raised together with a hotel, and its name came out of a public contest in 1926.

Irwin Chanin had a personal stake in the layout: as a poor Cooper Union student he could afford only top-gallery seats, reached by a separate door, so in his own houses every ticket holder would share one entrance. The complex, built in 1926 and 1927 on the site of twenty brownstones, also held the Theatre Masque and the Royale, today the John Golden and the Bernard B. Jacobs, plus the Lincoln Hotel, now the Row NYC Hotel. The Majestic, at about 1,800 seats, was meant for revues and light opera.

It opened on March 28, 1927, with Rufus LeMaire's Affairs, a revue that lasted 56 performances. The Shubert brothers bought into the Chanin houses in 1929, ran them from 1930 and owned them outright from 1945. In the mid-1930s it had more seats than any other legitimate Broadway house, so producers began moving proven hits here.

Rodgers and Hammerstein favored the house, opening Carousel, Allegro, South Pacific and Me and Juliet here between 1945 and 1953; South Pacific won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Later came The Music Man (1957), Camelot (1960), Golden Boy (1964) and The Wiz (1975), and in 1981 42nd Street moved in from the Winter Garden.

In 1987 42nd Street left for the St. James so the house could be refitted for The Phantom of the Opera, with an enlarged proscenium opening, a stronger roof for the falling chandelier and a pit dug under the stage. Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical opened on January 26, 1988, passed Cats in 2006 as Broadway's longest-running show and still held that record when it closed on April 16, 2023, after 13,981 performances. Afterward, the vertical sign went back from black to its first color, red.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission protected both the facade and the interior on December 8, 1987. A court challenge by theater owners against these designations failed in 1992.

Herbert J. Krapp, who designed more Broadway theaters than any other architect, dressed the Chanin buildings in what the developers called modern Spanish. The Majestic's lopsided facade pairs a wide entrance section with a narrower, taller stage house to the east. Golden Roman brick rises over a rusticated terracotta base, two wrought-iron fire-escape galleries carry sheet-metal roofs shaped like Spanish tile, and a blind Palladian window with twisted columns tops the entrance.

Inside, the ornament is classical, in the Adam style, first finished in ivory and gold. A single long, low foyer serves every seat, and its stone staircase splits in two on the way up to the orchestra and balcony.

The fan-shaped auditorium uses a stadium plan: the rear orchestra climbs until its back row is a full story above the street, and one deep balcony replaces the usual two. A curved sounding board above the proscenium shows Venus emerging from the sea, a shallow vine-ringed dome crowns the ceiling, and four boxes on each side step between stage and balcony. The proscenium opening is 40 feet 10 inches wide and 30 feet 10 inches high.

Access is partial, with no elevator or escalator. The sidewalk entrance is level, and orchestra rows AA through H are step-free, as are the four wheelchair locations; steps start at row I. The mezzanine is three flights up (51 steps), with about two steps per row. Some orchestra aisle seats have folding armrests, and an accessible restroom is on the orchestra level.

Infrared listening devices are offered at every performance. Starting four weeks after a show's official opening, handheld captioning and audio description devices are free, and both can also be used on a personal device; before that, live CART captioning can be requested two weeks ahead. Shubert Audience Services staffs a kiosk at each performance. Children under four are not admitted.