Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 19/06/2026 22:34:00

Housed in a Romanesque Revival former church on Theater Row in the Hell's Kitchen neighbourhood of Manhattan, the Westside Theatre is one of off-Broadway's most dependable venues. The building at 407 West 43rd Street was designed by the architect Henry Franklin Kilburn and constructed in 1890 for the Second German Baptist Church, which occupied it until the 1960s, after which the site spent a stretch as a nightclub before being converted into a theatre. The conversion to a two-stage performance space came in the early 1970s, and the Chelsea Theatre Group presented the first production, David Storey's The Contractor, in October 1973. The building passed through several names, including the Chelsea Westside Theatre and the Westside Arts Theatre, before an extensive renovation by new management reopened it in March 1991 under its present name and ownership. The venue contains two auditoriums that run separate productions simultaneously: an Upstairs Theatre seating around 270 in a proscenium configuration on the second floor, and a Downstairs Theatre with a thrust stage seating about 249. Both fall comfortably within the off-Broadway definition, and the building retains architectural presence from its origins as a church, particularly in its exterior massing. Under the management of Reno Productions since 1991, the Westside has built an unbroken record of housing long-running, commercially successful off-Broadway shows that reward a smaller room. Its productions have included the celebrated twelve-year run of I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, along with Old Jews Telling Jokes, My Name Is Asher Lev, Satchmo at the Waldorf and a long-running revival of Little Shop of Horrors. Three blocks west of the main Broadway district, the theatre is valued less for fame than for doing something genuinely useful well: providing two intimate, well-configured stages for proven commercial work. A church turned playhouse, it remains a fixture of New York's off-Broadway scene.