Boston's Little Princess has been trying out Broadway's future for over a century. The Shubert Theatre at 265 Tremont Street opened on 24 January 1910 with E. H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe - then America's most celebrated stage couple - in The Taming of the Shrew. Conceived as The Lyric Theatre by developer Charles H. Bond and completed after his death by New York's Shubert Organization, who named it for their late brother Sam S. Shubert, the Thomas M. James design gave the Theater District an ornate marble entryway, Florentine doors, French Renaissance gold relief work and a chandelier copied from the Petit Trianon at Versailles. The 1,600-seat room's intimate proportions made it Boston's pre-Broadway tryout house of choice: The King and I, South Pacific, Camelot and Mame all played the Shubert before their New York debuts, and the stage has carried Al Jolson, Laurence Olivier - introducing The Entertainer to American audiences - John Gielgud, Richard Burton, Mary Martin and Julie Andrews. A young Humphrey Bogart played Duke Mantee here in The Petrified Forest's 1936 tryout; the marquee outside is the last of its kind in the city. The building joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. A 1996 renovation under a forty-year lease with the neighbouring Wang Center - now collectively the Boch Center - reopened the theatre with the first national tour of Rent, and the room has since balanced touring Broadway with residencies from Boston Lyric Opera and other local companies. Steps from the Boylston and Tufts Medical Center stations, the Shubert remains what it was built to be: the sophisticated small sister in Boston's theatre row, where the big shows come to get intimate. The 1925 widening of Tremont Street cost the building its original facade and shortened the lobby, but the auditorium's proportions - the reason producers loved it for tryouts - survived intact, and the 1996 restoration returned the gilt and plasterwork to opening-night standard. Sharing the Boch Center campus with the vast Wang Theatre across the street gives Boston's Theater District a matched pair: the Wang for spectacle, the Shubert for shows that live on the human scale.

Type: Theater / Concert Hall

Address: 265 Tremont Street, Boston, MA, United States, 02116

Website: https://www.bochcenter.org

Capacity: 1600

Opening Date: 24/01/1910

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