Musical Today New York, United States
Hayes Theater
597 seats
The smallest theatre on Broadway — 597 seats, a third of what the houses around it hold — and the only one run by a non-profit on 44th Street. The Fantasticks begins previews here on 22 October 2026.
Inside the Hayes Theater
It was built to be small on purpose. Winthrop Ames put the Little Theatre up in 1912 with 299 seats on a single level, in flat contradiction of everything else being built on the block, because he wanted a room for plays that could not fill a thousand seats and should not have to.
That did not last. Herbert J. Krapp added a balcony in 1920 and the capacity roughly doubled, to the 597 it holds today across two levels — still, by some four hundred seats, the smallest theatre on Broadway. It carries the name of Helen Hayes, and since 2018 it has been the Broadway house of Second Stage Theater, the non-profit that also runs the Irene Diamond Stage on West 42nd Street.
The size is the point for a musical booked in here. Six hundred seats is off-Broadway scale inside a Broadway contract, which is a deliberate choice about how close the audience sits rather than a compromise on how many of them there are.
Opening dates, capacities and architects on this page come from the theatre's own history pages and from Wikipedia.
Getting there
Times Square–42nd Street on the 1, 2, 3, 7, N, Q, R, W and S; 42nd Street–Port Authority on the A, C and E.
