Musical Today New York, United States
James Earl Jones Theatre
1,092 seats
Built as the Cort in 1912 and renamed in 2022 for the actor who had played it, this is the Shubert house furthest north of the 44th Street cluster. Wanted opens here on 15 October 2026.
Inside the James Earl Jones Theatre
A Broadway theatre is rarely renamed for someone who acted in it. The Cort had stood on West 48th Street since 1912, designed by Thomas W. Lamb for the impresario John Cort, when the Shubert Organization renamed it in 2022 for James Earl Jones — who had played the house himself, and whose Broadway career had begun sixty-four years earlier.
The renaming came with a building works. An annex to the west of the original theatre was put up between 2021 and 2022 to designs by Kostow Greenwood Architects, adding the lobby and lift space a 1912 playhouse was never built with. Both the facade and the interior are New York City landmarks, so the room itself could not be touched.
It seats 1,092 across three levels, which the Shubert Organization breaks down as 502 in the orchestra, 264 in the mezzanine and 283 in the balcony. That puts it among the smaller Broadway musical houses — four hundred seats below the Gershwin, and some eight hundred below the St. James four blocks south.
Opening dates, capacities and architects on this page come from the theatre's own history pages and from Wikipedia.
Getting there
49th Street on the N, R and W; 47–50 Streets–Rockefeller Center on the B, D, F and M; 50th Street on the 1.
