HOME WEB NEWS IMAGES CLASSIFIEDS YELLOW PAGESPOLLS - SURVEYS WIKI COUNTRIES PHOTOS US UK INDIA
Cities Stocks Weather Movies Coupons Travel Blogs Health Horoscope Maps ASIA EUROPE Classifieds Yellow Pages
 1
|
The Helen Hayes Theatre, 2006.
The Helen Hayes Theatre showing Xanadu, 2007.
Helen Hayes Theatre (left) and St. James Theatre (right), 2007.
The Helen Hayes Theatre is a legitimate Broadway theatre located at 240 West 44th Street in midtown-Manhattan.
Designed by the architect firm of Ingalls & Hoffman and built by Winthrop Ames, it opened as the Little Theatre (so named due to its seating capacity of only 300) on March 12 1912 with the John Galsworthy play The Pigeon. In the 1920s, Herbert J. Krapp redesigned it to increase seating capacity to 590 and improve the acoustics.
In 1931, the building was sold to the New York Times and converted into a conference hall renamed New York Times Hall. CBS used the theatre as a radio facility for a time, but it was reconverted by ABC into a legitimate theatre in 1958, once again as the Little Theatre. Dick Clark\'s Saturday night The Dick Clark Show originated from there from February 1958 through September 1961. During this time, ABC also broadcast the daytime hit Who Do You Trust with Johnny Carson from the theatre. It was briefly renamed the Winthrop Ames Theatre in 1964. From 1965 through 1983 it was again the Little Theatre. During the first half of that period, Westinghouse Broadcasting taped the popular, syndicated Merv Griffin Show at the theatre.
The theatre was finally renamed for Helen Hayes in 1983 when the renowned actress\'s existing namesake theatre located on West 46th Street was demolished, along with the Morosco Theatre and the Bijou Theatre, in order to construct the Marriott Marquis Hotel. Hayes, known as the "First Lady of the American Theater," was still living at the time, and because of the unusual and embarrassing nature of her having outlived her monument, it was decided to rechristen the Little Theatre in her honor.
When not being used as a theatrical venue, the building also has been leased to CBS Radio and the Westinghouse Corporation.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia
