The American Airlines Theatre, originally the Selwyn Theatre, is a Broadway theater at 227 West 42nd Street in the Theater District of Midtown Manhattan in New York City. Built in 1918, it was designed by George Keister and developed by brothers Edgar and Archibald Selwyn, for whom the theater was originally named. The theater is owned by the city and state governments of New York and leased to New 42nd Street. It has 740 seats across two levels and is operated by Roundabout Theatre Company. Since 2000, the theater has been named for American Airlines (AA), which bought the theater's naming rights.
The Selwyn Theatre was designed in the Italian Renaissance style, with a brick-and-terracotta facade. The auditorium, which is on 43rd Street, had been accessed from the six-story Selwyn Building on 42nd Street, which collapsed at the end of 1997. The modern theater is accessed through the ten-story New 42nd Street Building, which has an illuminated steel-and-glass facade. The fan-shaped auditorium is designed in a blue-and-gold color scheme and has a shallow balcony, box seats, and murals. There are lounges for Roundabout subscribers above the auditorium and technical spaces in the basement. In addition, the New 42nd Street Building contains offices, rehearsal rooms, and an off-Broadway theater above the American Airlines' lobby.
The theater opened on October 2, 1918, with Jane Cowl's Information Please, and it initially hosted legitimate musical and dramatic productions. Arch Selwyn presented revues such as Wake Up and Dream (1929) and Three's a Crowd (1930). After Arch Selwyn's bankruptcy in 1934, the Selwyn became a cinema; the Brandt family took over the theater in 1937 and operated it for the next five decades. The Selwyn largely showed movies, except in 1949–1950, when legitimate plays alternated with film screenings. There were several proposals to redevelop theaters along 42nd Street in the 1980s. New 42nd Street took over the Selwyn and several neighboring theaters in 1990, leasing the Selwyn to the Roundabout Theatre Company in 1997. Following the collapse of the Selwyn Building, the theater was redesigned as part of the New 42nd Street Building. The theater reopened on June 30, 2000, after being renamed for AA. In June 2023, it was announced that the theater would be renamed after artistic director Todd Haimes who died in April of that year.
Site
The American Airlines Theatre is at 229 West 42nd Street, on the northern sidewalk between Eighth Avenue and Seventh Avenue, at the southern end of Times Square in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. The theater occupies two land lots. The main entrance and lobby are in the New 42nd Street Building on 42nd Street, while the auditorium is on a separate lot to the north on 43rd Street. The New 42nd Street Building occupies a rectangular lot covering around , with a frontage of on 42nd Street and a depth of . The auditorium is also on a rectangular lot covering , with a frontage of on 43rd Street and a depth of 100 feet 5 inches. Originally, the theater had a frontage of on 42nd Street and 96 feet on 43rd Street, with a depth of 100 feet from both streets.
The theater shares the block with the Hotel Carter building to the west, as well as the Lyric, Times Square, and New Victory theaters and 3 Times Square to the east. Other nearby buildings include 255 West 43rd Street, the St. James Theatre, and the Hayes Theater to the northwest; 229 West 43rd Street and 1501 Broadway to the north; 5 Times Square and the New Amsterdam Theatre to the southeast; and the Candler Building to the south.
The surrounding area is part of Manhattan's Theater District and contains many Broadway theaters. In the first two decades of the 20th century, eleven venues for Legitimate theatre were built within one block of West 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. The New Amsterdam, Harris, Liberty, Eltinge, and Lew Fields theaters occupied the south side of the street. The original Lyric and Apollo theaters (combined into the current Lyric Theatre), as well as the Times Square, Victory, Selwyn (now American Airlines), and Victoria theaters, occupied the north side. These venues were mostly converted to movie theaters by the 1930s, and many of them had been relegated to showing pornography by the 1970s.