What Will Become of the Ed Sullivan Theater?

There’s an opportunity, post-Colbert, for it to become a Broadway house once again. Illustration: Emma Erickson; Photo Getty Images Illustration: Emma Erickson; Photo Getty Images The Ed Sullivan Theater is dark these days. Not so much physically — the tradition of the ghost light still stands, and a glow comes through the stained-glass windows that were restored and reinstalled in 2015 when Stephen Colbert’s show moved in — but “dark” in the theatrical sense. Nobody is performing there. In its current form, the building is, if not quite a white elephant, at least a paler-than-ideal one. Late-night talk TV is a fading business, particularly taped-the-same-day-at-considerable-expense-in-Manhattan late-night talk TV. Nor are the networks doing much in the realm of the televised spectacular anymore. What will happen to the stage where Elvis’s swiveling pelvis was kept demurely out of frame, where the Beatles made their American debut, where Jackie Mason may or may not have flipped the bird at the host, where Topo Gigio found inexplicable fame? Will CBS/Paramount develop a new show there, use it for special events, put in some live-audience show along the lines of The Masked Singer or American Idol, mothball it indefinitely, or try something else entirely? Or just sell it off? The lobby and auditorium of the theater have been designated by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, so it can’t easily be turned into, say, a Trader Joe’s. Also, it’s part of a 13-story office building; even just for the upstairs space, the building would go for tens of millions. A representative of the network was unequivocal when I asked about a sale, saying, “There are no current plans to sell the Ed Sullivan Theater.” Note the present tense, though, which is a bit like a politician saying, “I’m not running for president” rather than “I won’t run for president.” However the delayed and intermittently troubled Paramount/CBS/Warner Bros. merger shakes out, there will surely be an assessment of the corporation’s holdings thereafter, and a big, underused building in Manhattan might be declared a surplus asset. Rumor has it that there’s been a lot of interest from potential buyers. Although CBS declined to offer any information or comment on those rumbles, anyone who knows the real-estate landscape in midtown West — not to mention an array of redditors — grasps that it could, at least theoretically, become a Broadway house. There are good reasons for that speculation. The Ed Sullivan Theater lies within the northern bound of the Theater District, which constitutes 40 houses plus one up at Lincoln Center. The majority of them are owned or operated by three entities: the Shubert Organization (which has 17 of them), the Nederlander Organization (9), and ATG (7). Asked whether they were interested in buying the Ed Sullivan, the Shuberts and Nederlanders declined to comment and ATG did not return a call requesting one. For what it’s worth, the Shuberts and Nederlanders were each said to have made a bid for the building in the early 1980s, when it last went through a period of disuse. CBS rented it back then and did not buy it till 1993 in order to house the Late Show With David Letterman, launched 33 years ago this week. That was the tail end of Times Square’s era of deep crumminess, and the decision to keep Letterman in town (at NBC; his studio had been at 30 Rock) was a vote of confidence in New York. It also enabled Letterman to continue using the city as a character, doing the eccentric-neighbors segments that would never work in, say, Los Angeles. The current Ed Sullivan Theater as it appeared in 1929… …and 1936, around the time CBS turned it into a radio studio. Photo: CBS via Getty Images Today, now that both Times Square and Broadway have been transformed into principally tourist-driven destinations, the demand for another proper theater is significant. Even though the business of Broadway has been shaky since the pandemic, in many years there still are more shows looking to open than there are theaters to hold them. These houses are not interchangeable; some are better for musicals, others for plays, and they all vary in size, from about 1,900 seats at the Gershwin to 597 at the Hayes. Quite a few are locked up with long-term tenants like Hamilton and Chicago. That leaves very few theaters of any given size available in each season. If producers have been developing a show downtown or in London and want, say, a 900-seat house, they often have to root for another show to flop and shut down. Occasionally, the demand leads to closing a show that’s doing well. A few years ago, Beetlejuice, which was finally selling a lot of tickets after a long, shaky start, got tossed out of the Winter Garden to make room for Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster in The Music Man, a show that needed one of the largest houses around. Putting one more small-to-midsize option into the mix would, during the busier seasons, loosen the logjam. As one theater insider phrased it to me, “Someone should nab it — a perfect playhouse. What a honey it would be.” The theater in 1947, three years before its TV career began. Photo: CBS via Getty Images The Beatles came to America there in February 1964. Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images CBS bought the building and launched David Letterman’s Late Show there in 1993. Photo: CBS via Getty Images Especially given that this building was, at least for its first few years, a Broadway house. It was built as Hammerstein’s Theatre, finished in 1927. (That’s Arthur Hammerstein, son of the impresario Oscar I, uncle of the Oklahoma! lyricist Oscar II.) It would be an expensive project to convert it back, but not an impossible one. The basics are there. Unlike a purpose-built movie theater, it already has dressing rooms and wings and fly space. It’s been reworked in order to make it work as a TV studio, and some of that would admittedly have to be undone. The rake of the floor has been altered, the stage extended forward past the proscenium. Most of all, the capacity has been reduced. Hammerstein’s Theatre seated 1,500. The Ed Sullivan holds about 400. The bottom limit for an official, Tony-eligible Broadway house is 500 seats, and the number of tickets you’d need to sell to cover a show’s running costs is likely higher. Filtered through a producer’s spreadsheet, the prospect is iffy. That same insider who called it a “honey” also said to me, “The caveat: ‘too small.’” You’d have to spend a lot to turn the Sullivan back into “a legit house,” as the trades call it. How much? The closest comparison is probably with the Hudson Theater on West 44th Street, which went through a similar trajectory. Built in 1903, it was variously used for radio and TV tapings, for movies (both straight up and porn), and as a party and events space. In 2017, ATG put it back into use as a Broadway house. Georgina Sperber, an architect at the firm OTJ, worked on its conversion, as well as the restoration of the Kings Theater in Brooklyn, and she tells me that it had some qualities in common with the situation at the Ed Sullivan: At the Hudson, too, the rake of the floor had to be remade and turn-of-the-century details needed to be restored and re-created, but neither building was a ruin. The budget for remaking the Hudson was a bit over $14 million, a small amount in some corporate settings but a number that might give you pause if you’re in the iffy business of Broadway. (With inflation and tariffs and whatnot, you might double that number today.) On that project, Sperber says, a sizable amount went for bathroom upgrades — old theaters almost never have enough — and ADA compliance. At the Ed Sullivan, renovated twice in the past three decades, most of that work has surely been done already. The demand for Broadway-eligible theaters is owed, in part, to loss. A century ago, there were about twice as many as there are today. Starting in the 1930s, as talking pictures and then radio and TV supplanted theater as the prime form of mass entertainment, some were converted to cinemas. Others became broadcast studios. In the 1960s and ’70s, a few ended up showing porn movies. Still more became venues of other kinds: The Gallo, an opera house with entrances on West 53rd and 54th Streets, first turned into CBS’s Studio 53, and then grew infamous when it became Studio 54. Xenon, the second-most-famous disco of the era, occupied the former Henry Miller’s Theater on West 43rd Street. (Both of those were eventually turned back into Broadway houses.) There are, counting the Ed Sullivan, eight buildings in the district that once were Broadway theaters and are now used for something else. The most visible among them is probably the Mark Hellinger, on West 51st, which became the Times Square Church in 1989. Despite offers, the Pentecostals there have declined to sell it back into secular use. Many other theaters disappeared altogether, torn down in the name of urban renewal. The Marriott Marquis hotel tower replaced five of them, including the beloved old Morosco, and outrage over their demolition continues to this day. Poor Helen Hayes, grande dame of the stage, lived long enough to see her namesake theater meet the wrecking ball. (They soon put her name on another house nearby, but still.) There was so much preservationist blowback that most of the survivors were soon designated, inside and out, by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. They are here to stay. There could even be — and this is speculation, I admit; nobody’s mentioned this to me as a possibility — a joint operating agreement. CBS/Paramount could retain the building and arrange with one of the theater companies to run it. The rent from the offices above would presumably continue to bring the network some income. CBS could negotiate a right of first refusal to option the shows running downstairs — the hits, at least — for future telecasts and pro-shots. As it happens, Ari Emanuel, engineer of so many Hollywood deals, just bought ATG. Synergy? In Defense of Murray Hill Where Is a Celebrity to Live in This Town? 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