Plymouth Theatre, West 45th Street

The Plymouth Theatre (now Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre) at 236 West 45th Street, Midtown Manhattan, immediately west of the Booth Theater. It opened its doors on October 10, 1917, with the comedy A Successful Calamity (announced in this photo) by Clare Kummer, with William Gillette (leading role), Richard Sterling, Roland Young, Estelle Winwood and William Devereaux. This play originally premiered at the Booth Theater on February 5, the same year. The six-story stage house is on the right. Photograph published in the Architecture and Building magazine, January, 1918.

Plymouth Theatre was designed by Herbert J. Krapp and finished in brown, blue and gold. The theater was leased and managed by producer Arthur M. Hopkins. Its façades and the auditorium were designated New York City landmarks in 1987. The theater was renamed in 2005 after Gerald Schoenfeld, longtime chairman of the Shubert Organization, which operates the theater.

This historic theater was home to countless numbers of plays through which the Broadway theater has come to personify American theater and it continues to help define the Broadway theater district, the largest and most famous concentration of stage theaters in the world.