Winter Garden Theatre

The Winter Garden is a large musical house on Broadway itself, near Times Square. The Shubert Organization operates it, and no other theater in the Shubert portfolio has belonged to the company for as long. Its big auditorium, stage and backstage suit large-scale musicals.

The Shuberts picked a name that recalled European entertainment halls such as the Berlin Winter Garden, and the first interior was dressed to look like an outdoor English garden.

The building began as a horse market, the American Horse Exchange, which William K. Vanderbilt built and then rebuilt after a fire in 1896. In 1910, with automobiles replacing horses, the Shubert brothers leased it and hired William Albert Swasey to turn the auction ring into a big house for musical revues.

Opening night came on March 20, 1911, and the first show, La Belle Paree, gave Al Jolson his Broadway debut. Jolson returned in musicals such as Sinbad (1918) and Big Boy (1925), and from 1912 the house also hosted The Passing Show, the yearly Shubert revue built to rival the Ziegfeld Follies.

Herbert J. Krapp remodeled the theater in 1922 and 1923. Warner Bros. ran it as a cinema from 1928 to 1933, opening with Jolson in The Singing Fool, and United Artists did the same from 1945 to 1948. Shows that opened here include West Side Story (1957), Funny Girl (1964), Mame (1966), Stephen Sondheim's Follies (1971) and 42nd Street (1980), and his Pacific Overtures was staged here in 1976. The Tony Awards were held here in 1975 and in September 2021.

For Cats, the auditorium was stripped and painted black to suit John Napier's junkyard design. The musical opened on October 7, 1982, became Broadway's longest-running show in June 1997 and closed on September 10, 2000, after 7,485 performances. Architect Francesca Russo then brought back the 1920s interior, and Mamma Mia! played here from October 2001 to 2013. A General Motors sponsorship made it the Cadillac Winter Garden Theatre from 2002 to 2007.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission protected the interior, but not the exterior, on January 5, 1988. Theater owners fought that round of designations in court and lost in 1992.

Swasey left the old roof trusses in view, painted the ceiling sky blue and lined it, like the walls, with wooden lattice, so the audience seemed to sit outdoors. Working inside the old exchange gave Swasey a room wider than it is deep, which keeps seats fairly close to the stage. No other Shubert stage has a wider proscenium opening.

Krapp reworked the room to suit revues rather than extravaganzas. He hid the trusses behind a lower ceiling, shrank the proscenium, removed the runway that had carried performers over the orchestra, and swapped the lattice for the Adam-style classical plasterwork he used across his Broadway houses. He also gave it the present boxes, two tiers of three on each side, set on angled walls beside the stage.

Overhead, ribbed vaults rise to a shallow central dome, with medallions of fauns playing pipes and lyres at its four corners. Over the stage, a curved sounding board shows a woodland scene of dancers and musicians. Outside, a modest entrance sits among storefronts, and large billboards for the show have hung on the facade since at least the 1930s.

The theater is only partly accessible, with no elevator or escalator. You can enter from the sidewalk without steps, and the whole orchestra, including the wheelchair locations, is step-free. The mezzanine is two flights up (34 steps), with roughly two steps down per row. A wheelchair-accessible restroom is on the orchestra level.

Infrared listening devices are available at every performance. Once a show has been officially open for four weeks, handheld captioning and audio description devices are free, and both services can be downloaded to your own device; earlier in a run, live CART captioning can be booked two weeks ahead. Shubert Audience Services staffs a kiosk at each performance. Children under four are not admitted.