Samuel J. Friedman Theatre

Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC), a nonprofit company, owns this 650-seat house and uses it as its Broadway stage, usually for three plays a season. Built in 1925 as the Biltmore Theatre, the house has carried the name of Samuel J. Friedman (1912–1974), a Broadway press agent, since 2008, following a gift his children made to MTC.

Builders Irwin and Henry Chanin, newcomers to show business, made the Biltmore their second Broadway theater, after the 46th Street Theatre (now the Richard Rodgers), and the first on the north side of West 47th Street, then a mostly residential block. The curtain first rose on December 7, 1925, on Owen Davis's Easy Come Easy Go.

The Chanins lost the building in the Depression. The Federal Theatre Project used the stage next, and in 1936 Warner Bros. bought it for George Abbott's productions, starting with the hit Brother Rat, and The Heiress premiered here in 1947. From 1952 to 1961, CBS used it as a radio and television studio.

Producer David Cogan brought plays back in 1961. Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park, with Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley, opened in October 1963 and stayed until 1967, about 1,530 performances; the rock musical Hair followed in 1968 and ran into 1972.

On November 10, 1987, the Landmarks Preservation Commission protected the auditorium interior, though not the facade. A month later an arson fire damaged the stage and seats, and the dark house decayed under a series of owners, including the Nederlander Organization and Stewart F. Lane from 1993.

MTC began restoring it in December 2001. The theater reopened on November 6, 2003, with Richard Greenberg's The Violet Hour, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, took its new name on September 4, 2008, and became MTC property the next month.

Later productions include David Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole (2006), which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and two winners of the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play: August Wilson's Jitney (2017) and Jonathan Spector's Eureka Day (2024).

Herbert J. Krapp, a veteran designer of Shubert theaters, drew the Biltmore. With no booking chain behind them, the Chanins relied on looks to attract audiences, so Krapp made this neo-Renaissance front busier than his Shubert facades: terracotta trim on brick, four fluted pilasters dividing the upper floors into three bays, and balustrades above the cornice.

Inside, Krapp chose the Adam style, which he used for only one other Chanin house, the Richard Rodgers. The horseshoe-shaped auditorium sits at a slight angle to its lot, unusual on Broadway, under an oval dome edged with Adam-style moldings. False boxes with Ionic-style columns and panels of musical instruments flank a proscenium trimmed with rope molding.

In the restoration, designed by Polshek Partnership, EverGreene Architectural Arts remade about 70 percent of the plaster to the original designs. Moving the rear wall 20 feet forward created a lobby where the doors had once opened straight into the seats, and digging about 19 feet into bedrock produced the Susan and Peter J. Solomon Family Lounge downstairs, with a bar, coat lockers and MTC's shop.

From the street-level entrance, three steps rise to the inner lobby; an elevator beside the box office avoids them and serves every floor. A motorized lift reaches odd-numbered seats on house left in front orchestra rows AA to F. MTC lists six wheelchair spaces in the orchestra and one in the mezzanine, aisle seats with folding armrests, and accessible restrooms in the Solomon Lounge and on the mezzanine.

The auditorium has an induction loop for telecoil hearing aids, and assistive listening devices are lent without charge. Starting about three weeks after opening night, handheld captions and recorded audio description are offered at every performance, with open captioning and live description on selected dates. Programs come in Braille and large print, service animals are welcome, and MTC publishes a visual story of a visit online.