Walter Kerr Theatre

The Walter Kerr Theatre is a three-level Broadway playhouse on West 48th Street with fewer than 1,000 seats. ATG Entertainment owns and operates it. Since taking its present name in 1990, it has housed seven productions that won the Tony Award for Best Play, plus two Best Musical winners.

It opened in 1921 as the Ritz Theatre. The name now honors Walter Kerr (1913–1996), drama critic of the New York Herald Tribune and later The New York Times, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1978.

In 1920 the Shubert brothers drew up plans for six playhouses on 48th and 49th Streets and hired Herbert J. Krapp for all of them. Four were completed, and three survive: this one, the Ambassador and the Eugene O'Neill. Construction of the Ritz reportedly took just 66 days, and its first production, John Drinkwater's Mary Stuart, opened on March 21, 1921.

Leslie Howard and Alfred Lunt appeared in Outward Bound (1924) and Bette Davis in Broken Dishes (1929); Hassard Short's Ritz Revue (1924) was the first musical here. From 1936 to 1939 the Federal Theatre Project leased the house. Broadcasters followed: CBS in 1939, then NBC, the Blue Network and ABC, which used it as a studio until 1965, with a brief return of live shows in 1942 and 1943.

Dark until 1969, the Ritz then cycled through quick flops, adult films, vaudeville and a children's theater before ending the 1970s as a poster warehouse.

Jujamcyn Theaters acquired it in 1981 and renovated it, turning the second balcony, then used to house air-conditioning equipment, back into seating. The Flying Karamazov Brothers reopened it on May 10, 1983. In 1987, when the Landmarks Preservation Commission protected a large group of Broadway theaters, it turned down both the facade and the interior of the Ritz, so the building is not a city landmark.

After a musical salute to Kerr on March 5, 1990, August Wilson's The Piano Lesson opened on April 16, the first of four Wilson plays on this stage. Tony Kushner's two-part Angels in America played here from 1993 to 1994, and later Best Play winners included Terrence McNally's Love! Valour! Compassion! (1995), Proof (2000), which ran for 917 performances, Take Me Out (2003), Doubt (2005) and Clybourne Park (2012).

A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder stayed from 2013 to 2016, for almost 1,000 performances, and Springsteen on Broadway, first booked for eight weeks, ran from October 2017 to December 15, 2018. Hadestown opened on April 17, 2019; as of October 2026, no production has run longer in this building. Jujamcyn merged with ATG in 2023.

Krapp (1887–1973) kept the front of the Ritz plain. Its only ornament comes from the bricks themselves, laid in a diamond grid known as a diaper pattern, possibly a sign of tight budgets after World War I. Fire escapes cross the facade, with a marquee over the doors and a large sign to one side.

Faux-granite walls under a burgundy ceiling line the lobby. The Adam-style auditorium, its decoration overseen by the Shuberts' own design studio, resembles Krapp's Broadhurst and Plymouth (now the Gerald Schoenfeld) on a smaller scale. Its purple, vermilion and gold scheme turned pink, mauve and gray in 1983, when the mural of Diana with two hounds above the proscenium was restored and Art Deco chandeliers and sconces arrived.

As of October 2026, only the orchestra can be reached without stairs. The sidewalk entrance has no steps, and all wheelchair, companion and aisle-transfer locations are on that level; seats for patrons with low vision or hearing loss are held in row D of the center orchestra. There is no elevator or escalator, and a single-stall, all-gender accessible restroom is on the orchestra level.

At the orchestra-lobby headset booth, guests can borrow infrared headsets, induction neck loops, D-Scriptive and I-Caption devices, or Showtrans units in six languages, including Spanish and Japanese, all at no cost; any of them can be reserved ahead.