Broadhurst Theatre (Broadway)

George H. Broadhurst, the Anglo-American dramatist (1866-1952), came to America in 1886. In addition to writing popular plays, he managed theatres in Milwaukee, Baltimore, and San Francisco before he opened his own theatre, the Broadhurst, in association with the Shubert brothers.

Located at 235 West Forty-fourth Street, right next door to the Shubert Theatre, the Broadhurst was designed by architect Herbert J. Krapp, one of the major theatre designers of that era. With a seating capacity of 1,155 and a wide auditorium that offered unobstructed views of the stage, the theatre was constructed to house both musicals and straight fare, which it has done successfully for over sixty years.n Sloane. During the run at the Broadhurst, one George Gershwin song, "Some Wonderful Sort of Someone," was interpolated.

The Broadhurst had two hits in 1919. Rachel Crothers's "39 East" was a comedy of manners that starred Alison Skipworth, Henry Hull, and Constance Binney. Later in the run "Hull" was replaced by Sidney Blackmer and Binney by a striking young actress named Tallulah Bankhead. On December 30 Jane Cowl scored one of her early successes in a romantic drama called "Smilin' Through," which she coauthored with Allan Langdon Martin. Ms. Cowl played a ghost in some scenes and the ghost's niece in others, serving to confuse critic Alexander Woollcott, who complained that these quick-change tricks belonged more to vaudeville than to the legitimate theatre. But audiences loved Smilin' Through for 175 performances.

In September 1921 George Broadhurst brought his American version of the British play "Tarzan of the Apes" to his theatre. The New York Times critic labeled the show "rather astonishing.'' A British actor, Ronald Adair, played Tarzan, and there were real lions and monkeys onstage, but the Ape Man managed to swing from tree to tree for only thirteen performances.

In November 1921 Lionel Barrymore won plaudits for his acting in a French play called "The Claw," in which he played a politician who is ruined by a conniving woman. Critic Alexander Woollcott reported in"the Times" that the play was attended by "the most bronchial audience of the season that coughed competitively through each scene and applauded with vehemence at its conclusion."

One of the most popular themes of this era --that of two generations of lovers from the same family--cropped up again in the musical "Marjolaine," starring Peggy Wood. It ran for 136 performances in 1922. In 1923 The Dancers, the London play by Sir Gerald Du Maurier in which Tallulah Bankhead had made her dazzling British debut, came to the Broadhurst with Richard Bennett and Florence Eldridge. It was a hit. Later in the year a revue called Topics of 1923, with Alice Delysia, frolicked for 143 performances.

On February 12, 1924 (the same day that George Gershwin's famous "Rhapsody in Blue" had its Manhattan premiere), the Broadhurst celebrated Lincoln's birthday with a distinguished hit, "Beggar on Horseback," by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. This expressionistic play, focusing on a composer (Roland Young) who almost marries into a stuffy rich family but is saved from this fate by an extended surrealistic dream about how life would be with them, caused a sensation. It ran for 224 performances and is still regarded as a classic of its genre.

Another sensation was caused by Katharine Cornell in "The Green Hat" (1925), by Michael Arlen. Based on Mr. Arlen's shocking novel of the same name, the play was considered extremely daring. It dealt with a bride (Cornell) whose husband commits suicide on their honeymoon. The audience does not learn until later that the husband threw himself out of a hotel window because he had a venereal disease. The excellent cast included Leslie Howard, Margalo Gillmore, Eugene Powers, and Paul Guilfoyle. The play was staged by Ms. Cornell's husband, Guthrie McClintic.

One of the theatre's greatest entertainments opened on September 16, 1926. Jed Harris, the boy wonder, brought his production of "Broadway" to the Broadhurst and it hit Times Square like a thunderbolt. Written by Philip Dunning and George Abbott, it mesmerized firstnighters and subsequent audiences with its kaleidoscopic view of life in a New York nightspot called the Paradise Club. A jazz band, dancing girls, a fast-talking hoofer perfectly played by Lee Tracy, gangsters, bootleggers, murderers, and nightclub habitues thronged the Broadhurst stage and electrified theatregoers for 603 performances. Winston Churchill once declared that this was his favorite show of all time.

Winthrop Ames brought his production of "The Merchant of Venice" to the theatre in 1928. With George Arliss as Shylock and Peggy Wood as Portia, it managed to run for a respectable seventy-two performances.

On October 10, 1928, Bert Lahr achieved immortality in a raucous musical, Hold Everything, by DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson. Lahr played a punch-drunk boxer named Gink Schiner who was given to making strange sounds like "Gnong, gnong, gnong"; these utterances later became his trademark. The cast also included the beloved Victor Moore, Jack Whiting, Ona Munson, and Betty Compton, but it was Lahr who got the raves and who kept the musical running for 413 performances. The hit song was "You're the Cream in My Coffee."

The Broadhurst had another winner in 1929, June Moon. A satire on Tin Pan Alley's song writers, the play was written by George S. Kaufman and Ring Lardner and it kept the Broadhurst shaking with laughter for 272 performances. Norman Foster played a lyricist who writes an imbecilic hit tune, "June Moon," and the tart Jean Dixon, Philip Loeb, and Linda Watkins gave comic support to this tuneful cartoon.

Rodgers and Hart came back from Hollywood in 1931 with a new musical, America's Sweetheart, that naturally spoofed the movie capital. The two young hopefuls who go to Hollywood were played by beautiful Harriette Lake (who really went to Hollywood and became Ann Sothern) and Jack Whiting. There was one hit song, the infectious depression lament "I've Got Five Dollars, " and acerbic performances by Jeanne Aubert and Inez Courtney, but the book by Herbert Fields was proclaimed dull and dirty and the show ran for only 135 performances.

Norman Bel Geddes, set designer extraordinaire, tackled Shakespeare's Hamlet at the Broadhurst in 1931. He adapted the play, designed its sets, costumes, and lighting, and directed it. Raymond Massey was the Melancholy Dane, Mary Servoss was Gertrude, Celia Johnson was Ophelia, and Colin Keith-Johnston was Laertes. Wrote Brooks Atkinson in the Times: "Mr. Bel Geddes has hacked and transposed until no idle philosophy is left to trip up his scenery. What he has left is, to this department, an incoherent, flat and unprofitable narrative." The production expired after twenty-eight performances.

Philip Barry restored art to the Broadhurst with his finely written high comedy The Animal Kingdom in 1932. Leslie Howard gave one of his most ingratiating performances as a man who marries the wrong woman. The blue-chip cast included Frances Fuller, Ilka Chase, and William Gargan. It was Barry at his best.

Claude Rains and the fetching Jean Arthur could not save a drama called The Man Who Reclaimed His Head in 1932. Also in the cast, as a maid, was Lucille Lortel, who now has an Off-Broadway theatre named after her.

George Abbott and Philip Dunning, whose play Broadway was one of the Broadhurst's biggest hits, produced another hit in 1932, but not of their authorship. They presented Hecht and MacArthur's rambunctious farce 20th Century, which took place on board the Twentieth-Century Limited en route from Chicago to New York. Moffat Johnston played an egomaniacal Broadway producer (said to be inspired by Jed Harris) trying to get a famous actress (Eugenie Leontovich) to sign a contract with him. Directed with express-train speed by Abbott, the comedy delighted for 154 performances.

Another highlight of the 1930s included the Group Theatre's realistic production of Sidney Kingsley's hospital drama Men in White, which won the Pulitzer Prize for the 1933-34 season. Starring Alexander Kirkland Luther Adler, J. Edward Bromberg, Morris Carnovsky, and Russell Collins, it also featured such Group luminaries as Clifford Odets and Elia Kazan. Staged by Lee Strasberg, the play contained an operation scene that held audiences spellbound with its chilling realism.

Eva Le Gallienne brought her Civic Repertory Company to the Broadhurst in 1934 and performed with Ethel Barrymore (and Barrymore's children, Ethel and Samuel Colt) in Rostand's costume play L'Aiglon. Without Ethel, Ms. Le Gallienne also presented and acted in Hedda Gabler and The Cradle Song.

On January 7, 1935, Leslie Howard returned to the Broadhurst in Robert E. Sherwood's The Petrified Forest and enthralled audiences with his portrayal of an intellectual wanderer who allows a gangster to kill him so that he may leave his insurance money to a lovely young woman who wishes to study art in Paris. The gangster was played so vividly by Humphrey Bogart that Leslie Howard brought him to Hollywood to repeat his performance in the film version and made him a star.

Helen Hayes scored perhaps her greatest triumph in Victoria Regina in 1935, playing the queen from a young girl to an aged monarch with remarkable physical changes. Gilbert Miller's lavish production and staging, and the enormous cast, including Vincent Price as Prince Albert, made this one of the Broadhurst's most memorable events.

The remainder of the 1930s included Ruth Gordon's brilliant Nora in A Doll's House, which moved from the Morosco in 1938; Dodie Smith's charming family-reunion play Dear Octopus (1939); the great Bill Robinson in Mike Todd's splashy production of The Hot Mikado (1939); and Carmen Miranda's cyclonic Broadway debut in The Streets of Paris (1939), a lusty revue starring Bobby Clark, Abbott and Costello, Luella Gear, Gower (Champion) and Jeanne, and Jean Sablon.

During the 1940s musicals, revues, and comedies brightened the Broadhurst. Ed Wynn convulsed his fans in Boys and Girls Together (1940), with Jane Pickens and the DeMarcos; George Jessel, Bert Kalmar, and Harry Ruby created a lively musical about a burlesque troupe, High Kickers (1941), and Jessel, Sophie Tucker, Betty Bruce, and a cast of burlesque comics turned it into a hit; Eva Le Gallienne and Joseph Schildkraut sent shivers down the spine in the mystery melodrama Uncle Harry (1942); Dorothy Kilgallen's husband, Richard Kollmar, produced and starred in Early to Bed (1943), a Fats Waller musical about a track team that mistakes a bordello for a hotel, and it ran for 380 performances despite bad reviews; Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians, with practically the entire cast ending as stiffs, enjoyed success in 1944; Follow the Girls (1945-46), a noisy musical with Jackie Gleason and Gertrude Niesen, moved from the New Century to the Broadhurst and stayed for almost a year; Three to Make Ready (1946), the third and last of the revue series by Nancy Hamilton and Morgan Lewis, starred Ray Bolger, Gordon MacRae, Brenda Forbes, Arthur Godfrey, Harold Lang, and Carleton Carpenter and ran five months after it moved to the Broadhurst from the Adelphi: Helen Hayes returned in Happy Birthday (1946-48), a comedy by Anita Loos about a shy Newark, New Jersey, librarian, and the sentimental play ran for 564 performances.

From 1948 to 1950, four revues played the Broadhurst. They were Make Mine Manhattan, with Sid Caesar, David Burns, Sheila Bond, Joshua Shelley, and Kyle MacDonnell; Nancy Walker, Jackie Gleason, Hank Ladd, and Carol Bruce in Along Fifth Avenue; Charles Gaynor's delirious Lend an Ear (which moved here from the National Theatre), with Carol Channing, Yvonne Adair, William Eythe, Gene Nelson, and Jenny Lou Law; and Jean and Walter Kerr's Touch and Go, with Nancy Andrews, Peggy Cass, Dick Sykes, Kyle MacDonnell, Helen Gallagher, and Jonathan Lucas.

The 1950s brought some long-running hits to the Broadhurst, but Romeo and Juliet, with Olivia de Havilland and Douglas Watson, was not one of them. It only achieved 49 performances in 1951. An interesting musical, Flahooley, with Barbara Cook, Ernest Truex, Jerome Courtland, Irwin Corey, Yma Sumac, and the Bill Baird Marionettes, managed only 40 performances in 1951; a musical version of Seventeen (1951) fared much better, playing for 180 performances; a revival of the 1940 Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey (1952-53), with Vivienne Segal repeating her role as the lusty Vera, who keeps the young Joey (Harold Lang) in a luxurious love nest, was even more successful than the original production, running for 540 performances; Katharine Cornell starred in a fair melodrama, The Prescott Proposals (1953), by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse; Kitty Carlisle and Macdonald Carey had a long run in a vapid comedy, Anniversary Waltz (1954); Sidney Kingsley turned comic with a madcap play, Lunatics and Lovers (1954-55), starring Buddy Hackett, Dennis King, Sheila Bond, and Vicki Cummings, which had a healthy run; Shirley Booth found a suitable vehicle in William Marchant's The Desk Set (1955); Rosalind Russell made Auntie Mame immortal (1956-58); The World of Suzie Wong (1958-59), a claptrap Oriental romance starring William Shatner and France Nuyen, managed to last for 508 performances; and the last show of the 1950s--the musical Fiorello!--by Jerome Weidman, George Abbott, Sheldon Harnick, and Jerry Bock, brought another Pulitzer Prize winner to this theatre. Tom Bosley played the beloved Mayor La Guardia and won a Tony for his performance. The show also won Tony Awards for best musical, for direction (George Abbott), for best book (Jerome Weidman and George Abbott), best music (Jerry Bock), best lyrics (Sheldon Harnick), best producers of a musical (Robert Griffith and Harold Prince).

In 1962 Noel Coward's musical Sail Away sailed into the Broadhurst, with Elaine Stritch as a hostess on a luxury liner, but it was all too dated and chichi for 1960s audiences and it departed for London after 167 performances. Richard Rodgers fared better with No Strings, the first musical for which he wrote both music and lyrics, with a book by Samuel Taylor. The show moved here from the Fifty-fourth Street Theatre and starred Richard Kiley and Diahann Carroll. They made beautiful music together for 580 performances.

Other interesting Broadhurst bookings in the 1960s included the Tom Jones--Harvey Schmidt musical 110 in the Shade (1963); the British import Oh, What a Lovely War (1964); another British musical, Half a Sixpence (1965-66) starring Tommy Steele.

On November 20, 1966, a cherished musical came to this theatre. Cabaret, a musical version of John Van Druten's play, I Am A Camera, which, in turn was adapted from Christopher Isherwood's stories about his youthful days in Berlin, dazzled audiences with its innovative direction by Harold Prince and Joel Grey's mesmerizing performance as a leering nightclub M.C. The brilliant show won the following Tony Awards: Best Musical (Book by Joe Masteroff); Best Musical Director (Harold Prince); Best Music and Lyrics (Fred Ebb and John Kander); Best Supporting Actor (Joel Grey); Best Supporting Actress (Peg Murry); Best Set Designer (Boris Aronson); and Best Costumes (Patricia Zipprodt). It ran for 1,166 performances, but not all at the Broadhurst.

Next at this theatre was Eugene O'Neill's More Stately Mansions, starring Ingrid Bergman, Colleen Dewhurst and Arthur Hill, directed by Jose Quintero; and Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam, starring Anthony Roberts and Diane Keaton.

By the 1970s the revue genre was dead and the Broadhurst fare veered from dramas and comedies to musicals. Highlights included Sada Thompson's brilliant portrayal of three sisters and their mother in Twigs (1971), by George Furth; Grease, a rock musical about high school students in the 1950s, which moved from the downtown Eden Theatre to the Broadhurst and became the second-longest-running musical in Broadway history (A Chorus Line surpassed it in September 1983); Neil Simon's uproarious comedy about two veteran comics, The Sunshine Boys (1972); John Wood in a marvelous revival of William Gillette's Sherlock Holmes (1974); Katharine Hepburn and Christopher Reeve in Enid Bagnold's curious comedy A Matter of Gravity (1976); the wonderful musical Godspell (1976), based on the Gospel According to St. Matthew, which moved from Off-Broadway to the Broadhurst; Preston Jones's ambitious work A Texas Trilogy (1976), which was not as successful in New York as it had been in Washington, D.C.; Larry Gelbart's wild adaptation of Ben Johnson's Volpone (1976), with George C. Scott and Bob Dishy giving bravura performances; Bob Fosse's dance explosion Dancin' (1978), a revue spotlighting Fosse's flashy choreography danced by Broadway's best dancers, which ran at the Broadhurst for almost three years before moving to the Ambassador Theatre.

Dancin', the Broadhurst's longest-running show up to that time, was followed by another triumph. On December 17, 1980, Peter Shaffer's acclaimed London play Amadeus opened at the theatre, with Ian McKellen as Salieri, Tim Curry as a comic Mozart, and Jane Seymour as the composer's wife. It was the season's most distinguished offering. It won the Tony Award for best play and Ian McKellen won as most outstanding actor. This drama was followed by the musical The Tap Dance Kid.

In 1984, Dustin Hoffman starred in a new production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman; this was followed by a revised version of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple starring Sally Fields and Rita Moreno as the mismatched roommates; a new production of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night starring Jack Lemmon and Bethel Leslie; a return engagement of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby; Neil Simon's popular Broadway Bound, which won a Tony Award for Linda Lavin; Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Aspects of Love; Joan Collins in a revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives the short-lived Shimada and Andre Heller's Wonderhouse and Harold Prince's multi-Tony Award-winning musical Kiss of the Spider Woman with a score by Kander and Ebb and a book by Terrence McNally, starring Chita Rivera, Brent Carver and Anthony Crivello, all of whom won Tony Awards for their performances.

The Broadhurst Theatre, a prime house of the Shubert Organization, has always been one of the most sought-after theatres by producers. Its most recent productions have been Urban Cowboy; Into the Woods; Dance of Death; Fosse; The Judas Kiss; Once Upon a Mattress; Getting Away with Murder; The Tempest.

The Broadhurst's opening show was George Bernard Shaw's Misalliance on September 27, 1917, starring Maclyn Arbuckle. This was the first New York production of Shaw's philosophical 1910 comedy and it ran for only fifty-two performances. It was not performed again on Broadway until the City Center revival in 1953.

In 1918 the Broadhurst had a hit musical in Ladies First, starring Nora Bayes and comic William Kent. This suffragette show centered on a woman (Nora Bayes) who dares to run for mayor against her boyfriend. She loses the election but wins the boy.

Theatre Information:
235 West 44th Street
New York, NY 10036
US

Box Office: Telecharge: (212) 239-6200/(800) 432-7250

Public Transportation:
SUBWAY: Take the N,Q,R,W or 1,2,3,9 to 42nd Street, walk North on Broadway to 44th Street and walk West on 44th Street to the theatre; Take the A,C,E to 42nd Street, walk North on Eighth Avenue to 44th Street and walk East on 44th Street to the theatre.

Handicap Access:
ACCESS INTO THEATRE: Theatre is not completely wheelchair accessible. There are no steps into the theatre from the sidewalk. Please be advised that where there are steps either into or within the theatre, we are unable to provide assistance. ORCHESTRA LOCATION: Seating is accessible to all parts of the Orchestra without steps. There are no steps to the designated wheelchair seating location. MEZZANINE LOCATION: Located on the Second Level, up 1 flight of steps. Please Note: On the Mezzanine Level, there are approximately 2 steps down per row. Entrance to the Mezzanine is behind row L. RESTROOM: Wheelchair accessible (unisex) restroom is located on the main level. Additional restrooms (not wheelchair accessible) are located down 1 flight of stairs (20 steps).

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