Princess Theatre

Princess Theatre (New York). An intimate 299‐seat playhouse built by the Shuberts and others on 39th Street, between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, it was designed by William A. Swasey. The theatre opened in 1913 as the home for one‐act plays, but when this policy failed the playhouse was turned over to small musical comedies in 1915. These Kern musicals—Nobody Home (1915), Very Good Eddie (1915), Oh, Boy! (1917), and Oh, Lady! Lady!! (1918), along with two others written for the house but presented elsewhere—established new standards for musical comedy. They offered fundamentally believable characters in tight‐knit, fundamentally believable situations; they allowed both humor and songs to derive from these characters and situations and sometimes advance the action or character development; and they mounted these singularly literate, witty, and melodic works with grace and charm. The shows became known as the Princess Theatre musicals. The theatre continued to offer experimental plays in the 1920s. With the coming of the Depression it became a film house but was later rechristened the Labor Stage and served as the original home of Pins and Needles (1937). It then returned to showing films again before it was demolished in 1955.