Broadway Theatre

Stand for a moment on the pavement at Broadway and West 53rd Street. Listen. Yellow cabs hiss past on wet asphalt. A delivery bike rattles by. Somewhere a doorman calls out a name. Then look up at the marquee, with its rows of white bulbs glowing even in daylight. This is the Broadway Theatre, and the name is not an accident. Of all the playhouses in the theatre district, this is the one that carries the street's own name, and it sits right on the avenue itself.

That detail surprises many visitors. Most of the famous Broadway houses do not actually stand on Broadway. They line the side streets of the West Forties, between the avenues. This theatre is different. Its address is on the great diagonal avenue that cuts across Manhattan. It also sits a little north of the busy heart of Times Square. Walk here from the crowds of 42nd Street and you can feel the city change. The streets get a little calmer. The office towers rise a little higher.

The building opened in 1924, but not as a home for live musicals. It began life as the Colony Theatre, a movie palace built for the showman B. S. Moss. The architect was Eugene De Rosa, who designed a number of theatres in New York in that era. In the 1920s, cinemas were built like temples. They had plaster ornament, gilded details, and enormous auditoriums. Going to the pictures was an event, and the buildings were designed to make ordinary people feel like royalty for an evening.

Here is the first surprise. In November 1928, this building hosted the premiere of a short cartoon called Steamboat Willie. It was one of the first cartoons with fully synchronised sound. And its star was a small whistling mouse named Mickey. Think about that for a moment. The character who would grow into one of the most recognised figures on Earth made his public debut on a screen inside these walls. Few people walking past the marquee today have any idea.

In 1930 the building took the name it carries now, the Broadway Theatre. Over the following decades it moved back and forth between films and live performance. That flexibility came from its size. This is one of the largest auditoriums on Broadway, with well over a thousand seats. A house this big could fill a vast screen with light, or hold a full orchestra and a cast of dozens. Producers with ambitious shows have always been drawn to that scale.

The film story continued here. In 1940, Walt Disney chose this theatre for the premiere of Fantasia, his bold experiment that set classical music to animation. Disney wanted audiences to feel surrounded by the sound, and the screenings used an early multi-speaker system. Then, in the 1950s, the theatre became a showcase for Cinerama. This was a wide-screen process that used several projectors at once to wrap the picture around the audience. People came to be startled by the sensation of a rollercoaster ride on screen.

But it is the stage that made the Broadway Theatre famous among theatre lovers. In 1959, the original production of Gypsy opened here. It was the story of a ferocious stage mother, with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by a young Stephen Sondheim. Ethel Merman played the mother, Rose, and her performance became the measure for every actress who has taken the role since. Many fans still consider Gypsy one of the finest musicals ever written.

The late twentieth century brought the large British musicals across the Atlantic, and many of them landed here. In 1979, Evita opened at this theatre. It told the life of Eva Perón, the Argentine first lady, almost entirely through song. A few years later, Les Misérables began its long Broadway life on this stage before moving to another house. And in 1991, Miss Saigon arrived. That show became famous for a scene in which a full-size helicopter appears to lift off above the stage.

That helicopter is a good reminder of why big shows choose this building. A wide stage and a deep auditorium give designers room to attempt spectacle. Productions here are often physically large, with heavy scenery, big choruses, and complex machinery. The theatre has been operated for many years by the Shubert Organization, one of the major owners of Broadway playhouses. Like all its neighbours, it changes tenants as shows open and close, so the poster outside may tell a very different story by your next visit.

Now look at the façade. Compared with some of the ornate older houses on the side streets, the front of this building feels practical and direct. Its main presence is the marquee and the vertical signage, built to be seen by traffic moving up and down the avenue. Much of the character of this theatre lives inside, in the sweep of the auditorium. From the street, it speaks the language of advertising. Light, lettering, and the name of whatever show is playing now.

If you have a ticket, notice the moment you pass from the avenue into the lobby. The noise of the city falls away almost at once. Carpet replaces concrete. The air smells of fresh popcorn or polished wood, depending on the night. Then you enter the auditorium and the space opens wide. Because the house was built for movies, the seating spreads out broadly. On the upper levels, you may feel how high and far the rows climb.

Without a ticket, this corner is still worth a pause. In the hour before an evening curtain, a small crowd gathers under the marquee. Couples check their phones for seat numbers. Groups of friends take photographs beneath the lights. After the show, the doors open and the audience spills out onto the pavement, still humming the tunes. For a few minutes, the corner of Broadway and 53rd Street fills with a very particular kind of happiness.

So before you walk on, take one more look. Picture the movie palace of 1924, with its flickering silent films. Imagine the small mouse whistling on a riverboat, and an audience laughing for the first time. Then picture Ethel Merman, and the helicopter, and the thousands of nights in between. The marquee in front of you is simply the newest line in a long story. As you head down the avenue, listen for the city's sound again. It has been the soundtrack outside this door for a century.