New Amsterdam Theatre

The New Amsterdam is a large musical house on 42nd Street, and since 1997 it has housed Disney's stage musicals. Disney Theatrical Productions runs it, and the auditorium holds 1,702 seats on three levels. The name honors New Amsterdam, the Dutch town that came before New York City.

It opened in 1903, the same year as the Lyceum and the Hudson, which puts it among the oldest Broadway houses still in use. Both its exterior and its interior are city landmarks. Audiences here get a Showbill instead of a Playbill, an edition without liquor ads.

The producers Marc Klaw and Abraham L. Erlanger, leaders of the era's biggest booking agency, built the house in 1902 and 1903. Its first night, October 26, 1903, brought a costly Shakespeare flop, A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Merry Widow had its American premiere here in 1907, and Irving Berlin wrote his first complete Broadway score for Watch Your Step (1914).

From 1913 to 1927 the Ziegfeld Follies of Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. came back nearly every year, with stars such as Fanny Brice and W. C. Fields. From 1915 his Midnight Frolic filled the rooftop theater. Sally (1920) gave Marilyn Miller her first musical comedy role, and Fred and Adele Astaire danced in The Band Wagon (1931).

In May 1936 a lender, Dry Dock Savings, foreclosed on the building. A 21-performance Othello with Walter Huston in 1937 was the last live production for decades. That July the house reopened as a cinema, with the film of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and showed movies until about 1982 or 1983. The city landmarked the exterior and interior on October 23, 1979; the National Register of Historic Places listed it on January 10, 1980.

A rescue by the Nederlander Organization stalled when workers found rotting girders. Before the restoration, the roof had holes and mushrooms sprouted in the auditorium. In January 1994 Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Governor Mario Cuomo announced plans to bring it back, and Disney took it on under a long-term lease. The work, designed by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, was finished on April 2, 1997, and helped revive Times Square.

The Lion King opened here in November 1997 and stayed until June 2006. Mary Poppins played from November 16, 2006, to March 3, 2013. Aladdin opened on March 20, 2014; as of October 2026, it is the longest-running production in the theater's history.

Herts & Tallant, the firm of Henry Beaumont Herts and Hugh Tallant, designed the building in two parts: a 10-story office tower on 42nd Street for Klaw and Erlanger's business, and the auditorium behind it on 41st Street. The gray limestone front carries the date 1903 near the top. In 1937 nearly all the sculpture on its lower three floors gave way to a movie marquee, which the restoration kept.

Inside is one of the city's rare Art Nouveau interiors. The narrow lobby is lined with terracotta panels by Roland Hinton Perry, with scenes from Shakespeare on one side and from Wagner's Ring operas on the other. Marble stairs have green glazed balustrades full of fable animals. Downstairs, the old smoking room, the New Amsterdam Room, is an oval of stone columns under a painted dome.

The auditorium is an ellipse, a shape the architects favored for its acoustics. Its two balconies are cantilevered, so no columns block the view, and the upper one hangs from the ceiling on rods. Sixteen dark-green peacocks climb the 40-foot-wide proscenium, under a mural begun by Robert Blum and finished by Albert B. Wenzell. Restorers rebuilt roughly half the oak woodwork and most of the plasterwork.

Elevators serve every level. Wheelchair and companion places are in the back rows of the orchestra and the mezzanine; nowhere else in the house is step-free. One accessible restroom is on the orchestra level's house-left side, and the mezzanine and balcony levels have their own. Staff can meet guests in the lobby and walk them to their seats. For hearing help, there are listening headsets and T-coil loops. As of October 2026, captions and recorded audio description are offered at all performances via the GalaPro app or on free handheld devices from a lobby kiosk. Service animals are welcome.