The New Amsterdam Theatre is a Broadway theater located at 214 West 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues in the Theatre District of Manhattan, New York City, off of Times Square. It was built in 1902-1903 and was designed by the architecture firm of Herts & Tallant; The Roof Garden, where more risqué productions were presented, and which is no longer extant, was added in 1904, designed by the same firm.
For many years the theatre was the home of the Ziegfeld Follies, George White's Scandals and Eva LeGallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre. It was used as a movie theatre beginning in 1937, closed in 1985, and was leased by the Walt Disney Corporation and renovated by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer in 1995-97 to be the flagship for Disney Theatrical Productions presentations on Broadway.
Both the Beaux-Arts exterior and the Art Nouveau interior of the building are New York City landmarks, having been designated in 1979. In addition, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
Along with the Lyceum Theatre, also built in 1903, the New Amsterdam is the oldest surviving Broadway venue. It is currently presenting the musical Mary Poppins.
Read more about New Amsterdam Theatre: Benefit Events
Famous quotes containing the words amsterdam and/or theatre:
“The Jew is neither a newcomer nor an alien in this country or on this continent; his Americanism is as original and ancient as that of any race or people with the exception of the American Indian and other aborigines. He came in the caravels of Columbus, and he knocked at the gates of New Amsterdam only thirty-five years after the Pilgrim Fathers stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock.”
—Oscar Solomon Straus (1850–1926)
“Compare ... the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)