Adelphi Theater (New York)
The Adelphi Theater is a former theater with over 1,400 seats on New York's Broadway (152 West 54th Street).
Changing names
The building was opened in 1928 under the name Craig Theater . Only in the period 1934–1940 and 1944–1958 was it called the Adelphi Theater . It was renamed the 54th Street Theater in 1958, the George Abbott Theater in 1965 , and demolished in 1970 to make way for the Hilton Hotel complex .
history
In 1934 the building was taken over by the Federal Theater Project, a government program to employ unemployed actors during the Great Depression . In 1940 it was acquired by the spiritualist organization Royal Fraternity of Master Metaphysicians until its director James Bernard Schafer was arrested in 1942. In 1943 it served as a Yiddish theater for a season until the Shubert Organization took over in 1944. In the 1950s, the television company DuMont Television Network used it as a studio where the sketch series The Honeymooners was filmed. In 1957 it was converted into a theater again, but after a series of failures such as Jule Styne's musical Darling of the Day (1968) it was sold to the Hilton Group, which built New York's largest hotel on the site.
Productions
The theater became famous under this name mainly due to the following successful musical productions: Leonard Bernstein's On the Town (1944), Kurt Weills Street Scene (1947), Richard Adlers and Jerry Ross' Damn Yankees (1955), the Elvis Presley parody Bye Bye Birdie by Charles Strouse (1960) or the late work No Strings (1962) by Richard Rodgers . Even Martha Graham was seen here with her ballet troupe.
Web links
Coordinates: 40 ° 45 ′ 45 ″ N , 73 ° 58 ′ 46 ″ W.