Stephen Sondheim Theatre

The Stephen Sondheim Theatre is a 1,055-seat Broadway house on West 43rd Street that is really two buildings in one: a brick front from 1918 and, behind and below it, an auditorium built new in 2009, mostly under street level. The Durst Organization owns it as part of the Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park, and the nonprofit Roundabout Theatre Company runs it alongside its other Broadway stages, Studio 54 and the Todd Haimes Theatre.

The house is named for the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021); Roundabout announced the new name for his 80th birthday, in March 2010. Before that, it bore the name of its builder, the English-born actor and producer Henry Miller.

Miller opened the doors on April 1, 1918, starring in The Fountain of Youth by Louis Evan Shipman. George Gershwin wrote his first full Broadway score for La, La, Lucille, staged here in 1919, and Noël Coward made his American debut in The Vortex in 1925.

Gilbert Miller took over the management when his father died in 1926. Thornton Wilder's Our Town opened here in 1938 before moving to the Morosco Theatre; later came Born Yesterday, T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party with Alec Guinness, and Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution.

The Millers parted with the building in the 1960s, and in 1968 it passed to developer Seymour Durst. It showed films from 1970, for a time as an adult cinema called Avon-at-the-Hudson, and in 1978 became the disco Xenon, then a string of other nightclubs. On December 8, 1987, the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission protected the facade; the interior was never designated.

Roundabout brought theater back in 1998 with Cabaret, billing the space as the Kit Kat Klub after the club where the musical is set; a construction accident next door later sent the show to Studio 54. Urinetown opened in September 2001 and closed in January 2004, the last show in the old auditorium.

Then everything behind the braced facade was demolished. The new theater, still called Henry Miller's, opened on October 15, 2009, with a revival of Bye Bye Birdie, and the Sondheim marquee was lit on September 15, 2010. Since then it has housed the 2011 revival of Anything Goes, winner of the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical; The Trip to Bountiful in 2013, a play the old house had first hosted in 1953; and Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, from 2014 to 2019. After the pandemic shutdown of March 12, 2020, performances resumed on October 21, 2021, with Mrs. Doubtfire.

Paul R. Allen designed the original building with Harry Creighton Ingalls of Ingalls & Hoffman. Its neo-Georgian front looks to English theater, and a 1918 architecture writer saw echoes of Drury Lane. White trim sets off the red brick, tall pilasters with Corinthian-style capitals divide the bays, curved iron railings guard the second-floor windows, and a frieze near the top still spells out the original name. The Henry Miller was also the first Broadway house built under the city's 1916 zoning rules, which let the side alleys hide behind arched gateways at either end.

COOKFOX, the tower's architects, designed the 2009 theater, and Adamson Associates Architects served as architect of record. Because the rebuilt hall could be no taller than the 1918 front, crews dug as deep as 70 feet. The oval box office lobby was restored with its plaster ceiling and central medallion of the muses, and its black-and-white marble floor was relaid with stone from the original Vermont quarries; old doors and Adam-style plasterwork were reused. The theater became the first on Broadway with LEED Gold certification, sharing the tower's on-site power plant and water recycling, and the women's restroom has 22 stalls.

Elevators reach every level but the house-left box, accessible restrooms included. There are six wheelchair locations in the orchestra and six in the mezzanine, plus transfer seats in both sections. The theater has 100 assistive listening devices and three hearing loops. Captioning and audio description run through GalaPro, on a borrowed device or your own phone, usually starting several weeks after opening; ask audience services for dates.