Walter Kerr Theatre

Walter Kerr Theatre, New York, on West 48th Street, between Broadway and 8th Avenue. Seating 950, this opened as the Ritz in 1921, but success did not come until 1924 with the production of Sutton Vane's Outward Bound and Galsworthy's Old English, with George Arliss as Sylvanus Heythorp. In the following year Ashley Dukes's The Man with a Load of Mischief had a short run. A further series of failures was broken in 1927 by the long run of John McGowan's Excess Baggage, a comedy on the heartbreaks of vaudeville. In 1937 the theatre was taken over by the Federal Theatre Project, which presented there the Living Newspaper Power. A year later T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral had a short run, and after a Federal Theatre production in 1939 the theatre was taken over for radio and television. Unsuccessful attempts to reopen it were made in 1970 and 1972, and in 1973 it was taken over by the Robert F. Kennedy Theatre for Children, which remained there until 1976 when a financial crisis caused it to leave. The theatre fell into disrepair, but reopened in 1990, renovated and renamed, with August Wilson's The Piano Lesson.