Shubert Theatre New Haven

I love historic old theatres, and the Shubert in New Haven has a great history. New Haven used to be a very popular city for producers to take a new show and have a pre-Broadway tryout. Oklahoma! for example had an out of town tryout in New Haven. These days New Haven has fallen out of favor as a tryout town, but the New Haven Shubert is still an important tour stop.

Given the electrical fire that occurred on the same block as the Shubert right before we came to town, we were lucky to be able to do the show at all. To be safe the town got out the generators just in case. The one down side (so the theatre claims) is that the electrical problems created a stink in the basement. I am not so sure of that myself. It just smelled like an stinky old building to me!

Given how close New Haven is to New York and how easy the commute is by car or train, I had some visitors to the show. Brian had decided a long time beforehand that New Haven is where he wanted to see Beauty especially given that he is also friends with Robyn, one of the silly girls.

I was also able to get Melissa to bring Emma up from New York to see the show. I had been hoping that Emma could see Beauty since it did not work out for her to see The Wizard of Oz when it was in New York. I was also curious to see how she took to the show given the fact that my nieces (Reagan being only 6 month younger than Emma) were going to be coming to Grand Rapids to see Beauty. Thankfully Emma liked the show!

The New Haven Shubert feels as much like a real Broadway theatre to me than any that I have played yet. The largest Broadway theatre is about 1900 seats, but most are around 1000-1400 seats. The typical theatre that we play on tour is well over 2000 seats. The decoration of the house is also very much like what one would find in New York.

Given the time constraints of our five show weekend in New Haven, I only got a few pictures of the Shubert inside the house. I felt like I did not really get one completely satisfying shot though. Thankfully, Jeremy did so I must thank him for letting me use his picture below.