St. James Theatre

The St. James is a large three-level house on West 44th Street, built mainly for musicals and now owned and run by ATG Entertainment. When it was new, few Broadway interiors were bigger.

At its 1927 opening it was Erlanger's Theatre, after Abraham L. Erlanger, the producer who had helped found the Theatrical Syndicate with Marc Klaw. Since 1932 it has carried the name of St James's Theatre in London.

Erlanger began planning a house here in 1921, but disputes with Klaw and the Shuberts stalled it for years; it became the last theater built for him. It opened on September 26, 1927, with George M. Cohan's musical The Merry Malones. After Erlanger's death in 1930, his estate lost the house in 1932 to the Astors, who owned the land, over unpaid rent; Lodewick Vroom then bought and renamed it.

Maurice Evans's Hamlet of 1938 gave American audiences the play's complete text for the first time. The Shubert Organization took over in 1941, and in March 1943 Oklahoma!, the first Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, began a stay of more than 2,200 performances. The King and I had its premiere here in 1951.

A 1956 antitrust settlement pushed the Shuberts to sell. William L. McKnight, head of Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing, bought the theater with Samuel H. Schwartz, and Jujamcyn, the company formed to run it, reopened it after a refit in December 1958. Hello, Dolly! arrived on January 16, 1964; when it closed in 1970 after 2,844 performances, no Broadway musical had run longer. As of October 2026, nothing has run longer in this building.

In 1987 42nd Street moved in from the Majestic. Mel Brooks's The Producers opened on April 19, 2001, and won a record 12 Tony Awards. For Frozen (2018), the stage was pushed 10 feet east into the alley separating the theater from the Hayes. After the pandemic shutdown, the St. James reopened before any other Broadway house, with Springsteen on Broadway on June 26, 2021. A 2023 deal put Jujamcyn's theaters under ATG.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission protected the facade and the interior alike on December 15, 1987; a 1988 suit by the Shuberts, the Nederlanders and Jujamcyn against 22 such designations failed in 1992.

Warren and Wetmore, the firm behind Grand Central Terminal, had never designed a theater before. Their eight-story building turns a plain stucco face to the street. Its main flourish is a two-story wrought-iron loggia with three arches that screens the fire escape, and masks of comedy and tragedy line the frieze near the top.

Inside, the architects relied on layout and color, with little plasterwork, unlike the Adam-style ornament common in 1920s Broadway houses; much of the decoration is painted to look like relief. The 1958 refit, designed by Frederick Fox, replaced the original coral and antique gold with charcoal gray and gold and hid Paul Arndt's side-wall murals under fabric and wallpaper.

The sounding board is painted to imitate coffering, with rosettes in a diamond grid. Above the stage opening, a mural places Satan in a temple of love fallen to ruin while cupids play golf, and painted jesters at either side pull back the curtains. On opening night Governor Al Smith sat in the Governor's box, one of two side boxes.

The orchestra is level with the sidewalk and holds all wheelchair, companion and aisle-transfer seats; within it, only rows Q through T in the center and right sections have steps. Center orchestra row B has mid-row seats for guests with low vision or hearing loss. With no elevator in the building, the upper levels mean stairs: 29 steps to the mezzanine, plus 20 more to its upper rows, and 76 to the balcony, all with handrails. The orchestra level has an accessible restroom, a single all-gender stall.

A booth in the orchestra lobby lends D-Scriptive and I-Caption devices, infrared headsets and neck loops free; for a new show, description and captioning usually begin shortly after opening night, and Sound Associates takes advance requests. Children under five are not admitted.