Booth Theatre

The Booth Theatre opened in 1913, built by producer Winthrop Ames specifically as an intimate venue for serious plays at a time when Broadway was dominated by larger musical houses. Architect Henry B. Herts gave it an Italian Renaissance facade and an interior scaled deliberately small — 766 seats across an orchestra and a single shallow mezzanine. It remains one of the smallest active Broadway theatres, and the only one that consistently feels like a London West End playhouse transplanted to 45th Street.

That intimacy is the Booth’s defining feature for ticket-buyers. The rear orchestra is closer to the stage than the front mezzanine is in most other Broadway houses. The center mezzanine, rows A and B, is widely considered one of the best seats on Broadway for a play — a clean stage picture from the right height without the premium markup of center orchestra. Side seats are forgivable here because the room is narrow; the worst seat in the house is genuinely closer to the action than the median seat in the Gershwin or the Lyric.

The Booth shares the same block as the Shubert, the Plymouth (now the Jacobs), and the Broadhurst — the Shubert Organization’s flagship cluster, and the easiest stage-door area on Broadway to find your way around.