Mac Rating: 0.00 | Votes: | Date: 03/06/2026 00:44:00

Opened in November 1924 as the Martin Beck Theatre, the Broadway house at 302 West 45th Street carries one of the more elaborate origin stories on the street. The vaudeville promoter Martin Beck commissioned it and, unusually for the time, paid for it outright, making it the only theatre in New York then standing without a mortgage. Architect G. Albert Lansburgh dressed it in a Moorish and Byzantine style meant to outshine its neighbours, with dressing rooms enough for 200 performers and an interior later granted city landmark protection. The venue spent its first eight decades under the Beck name, passing to the Jujamcyn organisation in 1965 and hosting a long run of notable productions, among them Katharine Cornell's Juliet, a celebrated Dracula, and revivals that carried stars from Elizabeth Taylor to Daniel Radcliffe. In 2003 it was renamed for Al Hirschfeld, the caricaturist whose spare line drawings of theatre figures appeared in newspapers for most of a century; he had died earlier that year, days before what would have been his hundredth birthday. Hirschfeld famously buried his daughter's name, Nina, in the lines of his drawings, a puzzle readers spent decades hunting for, which made the renaming a fitting tribute, and a mezzanine gallery displays reproductions of his work. With roughly 1,424 seats across two levels, it is one of the larger Broadway theatres and is generally given over to big musicals; more recent occupants have included Kinky Boots and the stage version of Moulin Rouge!, spectacle pieces suited to the room's scale. The building changed hands again when ATG Entertainment took over its operation, and the facade and interior were jointly designated landmarks in 1987, helping preserve the original decorative scheme. For theatregoers the draw is the combination of an ornate, century-old auditorium and the scale to stage major productions, a short walk from Times Square. As with most Broadway houses, sightlines vary, and the size that suits grand staging can leave the furthest seats a fair distance from the stage.