New York City Landmark Guide

Cort Theater

138 W 48th Street
between 6th & 7th Avenues

Completed 1913

Architect Thomas W Lamb

As an actor's ambition was to play in a legitimate Broadway house, and a vaudeville performer's to 'play the Palace,' a producer's ambition was to have a hit on the Great White Way. John Cort was, like Martin Beck, a successful theater operator on the West Coast. On arriving in New York he commissioned Lamb to bring his version of Versailles' Petit Trianon, one of the most beautiful and most copied buildings in the world, to Broadway. Lamb's elegantly simple neoclassical exterior accomplishes what the French original did: cloak a dramatically-detailed, lavish interior. The Versailles theme is reinforced by a mural of a dance in the Palace's gardens

The theater's premier production, J Hartley Manners' Peg o' My Heart, featured then superstar Laurette Taylor. Opening on December 20, 1912, the show ran for 603 performances, an almost unheard of number at that time. It signaled a ten year period when the Cort would routinely play host to runs of more than 300 performances, when most shows were expected to top out at about 100. The Cort has had a successful life as a legitimate Broadway venue, leased as a television studio for only a short time in the late '60s

1914 Under Cover, a drama by Roi Cooper Megrue, lasts 349 performances

1916 Fanny Hatton's and Frederic Hatton's comedy, Upstairs and Down, stars Leo Carillo and Christie. It is on the boards for a 320-performance run

1918 The Better'Ole stars Charles Coburn for 353 appearances

1922 George S Kaufman and Marc Connelly have a hit, the 398 performances of Merton of the Movies, starring Glenn Hunter

1930 She was a star of stage and became a star of the screen in 1917. Lillian Gish returns to Broadway in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya

1930 Arthur Byron, Merle Maddern and Frances Fuller are featured in Louis Weitzenkorn's Five Star Final

1933 Producer Jed Harris brings Laurence Olivier, Leo G Carroll and Jill Esmond together under Mordaunt Shairp's Green Bay Tree

1935 George Abbott directs Jerome Cowan and Allyn Joslyn through 669 performances of Bella and Sam Spewack's comedy Boy Meets Girl

1937 George Abbott again, now directing Sam Levene and Eddie Albert in Room Service

1939 Paul Vincent Carroll's comedy The White Steed stars Jessica Tandy and Barry Fitzgerald

1940 Jose Ferrer is in drag in the Joshua Logan directed comedy Charlie's Aunt

1944 Frederic March stars in Paul Osborn's classic drama A Bell for Adano

1950 Did William Shakespeare ever expect actresses Katharine Hepburn and Cloris Leachman would star in As You Like It?

1952 Jose Ferrer produces. Jose Ferrer directs and wins a Tony. Jose Ferrer stars and wins a Tony. Joseph Kramm authors and wins a Pulitzer. The show is The Shrike.

1953 Menasha Skulnick, 2nd Avenues 'mensch for all seasons,' stars uptown for 654 performances of the Sylvia Regan comedy The Fifth Season

1954 It's a staple of high school drama, but school productions of N Richard Nash's The Rainmaker don't star Geraldine Page and Darren McGavin

1955 Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett take the words of a young girl who didn't survive and turn them into chilling drama. Garson Kanin directs Susan Strasberg and Joseph Schildkraut in Kermit Bloomgarden's Tony-winning production of The Diary of Anne Frank

1957 If its Art Carney's Broadway debut it must be a comedy, right? Wrong. Morton Wishengrad's The Rope Dancers is a piercing drama starring Theodore Bikel, Siobhan McKenna and Joan Blondell

1958 Ralph Bellamy, James Earl Jones and Mary Frickett star in Dore Schary's Sunrise at Campobello. Directed by Vincent J Donehue, the show is Tony's outstanding play. Their efforts also pay off in Tony hardware for Bellamy, Jones and Donehue. A 7-year-old Richard Thomas makes his Broadway debut

1961 Ossie Davis' Purlie Victorious, directed by Howard Da Silva, features Davis, Ruby Dee, Godfrey Cambridge and Alan Alda

1965 Menasha Skulnick is uptown again, this time starring with Ossie Davis and Louis Gossett in Howard Da Silva and Felix Leon's The Zulu and the Zayda. Directed by Dore Schary, the show features young actors Yaphet Kotto and Joe Silver

1974 Doug Henning's The Magic Show takes over the Cort Theater for 1,920 performances

1979 Shakespeare. Al Pacino. Richard III

1982 Robert Whitehead chooses Medea as his directorial debut. It stars Zoe Caldwell and Judith Anderson. Caldwell, Whitehead's wife, wins a Tony

1988 Hugh Masakela collaborates with Mbongeni Ngema on the musical Sarafina.

1995 This revival of Ruth and Augustus Goetz' The Heiress stars Cherry Jones, Philip Bosco and Frances Sternhagen. The production wins a Tony for best revival; Jones' and Sternhagen's performances earn Tonys; the best direction Tony goes to Gerald Guiterrez

1997 Kate Nelligan is back on Broadway in Wendy Wasserstein's An American Daughter, sharing the stage with Hal Holbrook, Penny Fuller and Tony's featured actress winner Lynn Thigpen

1999 Kat and the Kings, a South African by way of London musical features a very loose book about the ups and downs of a doo-wop-inspired South African singing group