Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Theater Move Over, Henry Miller! Here Comes Sondheim!
Posted by Henry Stewart on Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 12:52 PM
- Artist's rendering
If you've always thought that it didn't make sense to have a Broadway theater named after a dirty novelist, you're right: the 43rd Street house takes its moniker from a British-born actor and manager who died in 1926, less than a decade after founding the theater that would bear his name for the next several decades. It housed the N.Y.C. premiere of Our Town in 1938 and is the current home of the Dame Edna-Michael Feinstein show All About Me. (Does anything more clearly spell Broadway's decline as a cultural force?)
The theater recently reopened after extensive renovations, and is on long-term lease by the Roundabout Theater Company.
The news' poignancy lies in the reminder that fame is ephemeral (who's Martin Beck? or the Selwyn Brothers?); in 100 years a snarky Elroy Jetson will transmit the news to future citizens' pocket computers that the "Stephen Sondheim Theater" was not named after the famous rocketball athlete of the 2050s. (Obviously, I'm just bummed because it's one more loss for the Henryes to the Stephens of the world.)
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