Broadway History - The Palace Theatre

The most legendary theater on Broadway, The Palace is also one of the oldest, built in 1913. Kirchhoff & Rose designed the theater expressly for the presentation of vaudeville —variety shows with comedy, magic, music, and dance—and every vaudevillian aspired to “play the Palace.” The deep lobby and enormous theater with its two balconies accommodated large audiences while private boxes, favorite features of vaudeville audiences, added to the theater’s allure. Once the most popular form of entertainment in the United States, vaudeville died out in the early 1930s and the revered Palace struggled to survive. In 1965, the Nederlander Organization bought it and hired Ralph Alswang, a Broadway scenic designer who had been begun designing theater interiors in the mid-1960s, to restore the Palace to its original grandeur. It reopened as a legitimate theater in 1966 with Neil Simons’s Sweet Charity. Many successful productions, including Applause, La Cage aux Follies, Woman of the Year, Beauty and the Beast, and Aida, have followed.