The Booth Theatre is a Broadway theatre located at 222 West 45th Street (George Abbott Way) in midtown-Manhattan, New York City.
Architect Henry B. Herts designed the Booth and its companion Shubert Theatre as a back-to-back pair sharing a Venetian Renaissance-style façade. Named in honor of famed 19th-century American actor Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth, the theater's 783-seat auditorium was intended to provide an intimate setting for dramatic and comedy plays. It opened on October 16, 1913, with Arnold Bennett's play The Great Adventure.
The venue was the second New York City theatre to bear this name. The first, Booth's Theatre, was originally owned by Edwin Booth, and built by the architectural partnership Renwick & Sands between 1867-69 on the corner of 23rd Street and 6th Avenue (see picture, below).
The Booth Theatre appeared in The West Wing episode Posse Comitatus. It hosted a fictitous charity performance of War of the Roses which an equally fictitious President Bartlet attended during the assassination of the Qumari Defence Minister Abdul ibn Shareef.
The theatre was recently home to the critically acclaimed Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winning musical Next to Normal, originally starring Tony Award winner Alice Ripley and Tony nominees J. Robert Spencer and Jennifer Damiano. The production then starred Marin Mazzie and Jason Danieley in Ripley and Spencer's original respective roles. The production closed on January 16, 2011.
Read more about Booth Theatre: Notable Productions, Box Office Record
Famous quotes containing the words booth and/or theatre:
“A man’s labour is not only his capital but his life. When it passes it returns never more. To utilise it, to prevent its wasteful squandering, to enable the poor man to bank it up for use hereafter, this surely is one of the most urgent tasks before civilisation.”
—William Booth (1829–1912)
“Mankind’s common instinct for reality ... has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man’s frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever.”
—William James (1842–1910)