Over the past century, The Shubert in New Haven has been host to the birth of Broadway hits (and misses) as well as a galaxy of the brightest stars, from Al Jolson and Helen Hayes to Katharine Hepburn and Marlon Brando to Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier. Here’s a look at its first glorious hundred years of live theater. Carol Channing recalls sleeping under an office desk at the Shubert Theater during long rehearsal periods, and begging a big producer not to cut her favorite number in a new musical. Before the first-ever public performance of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, at the Shubert in 1947, director Elia Kazan instructed his cast to run through their lines “conversationally,” a method that heightened their understanding of the play and soothed nerves for opening night. The show’s producer, Irene Selznick, was alarmed at one point by an unexpected laugh from the audience—the New Haveners were amused by Blanche DuBois saying she didn’t like to drink beer, but Selznick feared the reaction had been due to some technical mishap; the performance was plagued by lighting miscues and other minor problems. Al Jolson, already a major star in New York with several successful musicals behind him, had the out-of-town tryouts for one of his biggest stage hits, the Shubert-produced musical Sinbad, in New Haven in 1918. Sinbad was an immediate hit, though its initial Connecticut audiences missed out on two big songs that got added to the show later on: “My Mammy,” and George Gershwin’s first hit, “Swanee.” The Shubert’s world premiere of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, confused audiences with its audacious blending of ancient Roman comedy and 20th-century burlesque, so Stephen Sondheim was inspired to write the nonsensical opening number “Comedy Tonight” to drive home the show’s intentions. When Marvin Hamlisch gave concerts at the Shubert in the 1996 and 2002, he recalled playing on the same stage decades earlier as a rehearsal pianist. He also remembered the Shubert tryouts of Flora the Red Menace, the first musical to star his good friend Liza Minnelli. She went on to win a 1965 Tony Award for the show. In one of his memoirs, Groucho Marx recalled getting “kicked out of the finest hotel in New Haven”—presumably the Taft Hotel. Now an apartment complex, the hotel was next door to the Shubert, where the Marx Brothers had appeared in road tours of their earliest hits I’ll Say She Is and Animal Crackers. The Taft was where writers, directors and producers stayed up all night rewriting and reworking troublesome portions of their latest works. The Shubert is where those works got shown for the first time to unsuspecting, up-for-anything Elm City audiences. In 1910s, the Shubert was one of a fast-growing national chain of theaters. In the 1920s and ’30s, it was still holding its own against the slew of movie houses that had cropped up in the city. In the ’40s, it was the epicenter of a revolution in American musical theater, world-premiering such groundbreaking classics as Oklahoma!, Carousel, Annie Get Your Gun and Brigadoon. By the 1950s, the Shubert had already begun to embrace the new wave of intense American drama, premiering A Streetcar Named Desire and the Marc Blitzstein opera Regina (based on Lillian Hellman’s play The Little Foxes). In the ’60s, it was the proving ground for modern comedies, including the American premieres of the European plays Alfie! and Boeing, Boeing, and the world premieres of half a dozen Neil Simon shows. Then, for seven years ... silence. When celebrating the 100th birthday of New Haven’s Shubert Theater this year, we must also dim the marquee lights of our minds and remember that the last 30 of those 100 years nearly didn’t happen, and that for the seven years before that—from 1976 to 1984—the Shubert was closed, and seemed unlikely to ever part its curtains again. The resurgence of the Shubert seems as miraculous and wondrous as the many musical theater spectacles it’s hosted in its first glorious century. Like Carousel, the Shubert story combines entertainment, business, vulnerability, wild gambles, death and rebirth. Like Brigadoon, the theater has renewed and refreshed itself regularly, appearing as grand and vital in 2014 as it was in 1914, 1944 or 1964. It still offers unpredictability and excitement. The changes behind the scenes at this landmark venue have been as interesting to watch as the stars who’ve strutted its stage. The Shubert was not the first theater in New Haven to be run by the renowned New York-based Shubert Organization. That would be the Hyperion Theater on Chapel Street, which had been the third largest theater in New Haven when it was built (and dubbed “Carl’s Opera House”) in 1879, and had been acquired by the legendary Shubert brothers (Lee, J.J. and Sam) at the turn of the century. The Shubert we know today was created in 1914, by which time the Hyperion had become a silent movie house. Though it retained their famous surname, the Shubert Organization relinquished its New Haven operation in the early 1940s, whereupon it was carefully micromanaged by the local partnership of Morris Nunes (who died in 1948) and Maurice Bailey (who ran the Shubert until its ignominious closing in 1976). The Shubert was reborn in 1984 as a civic project to bring more folks downtown to shop, eat and be entertained. It worked, thanks to an immense amount of effort from city leaders, a volunteer board of directors, and tireless executive directors such as Judy Lisi and Carolyn Werth. But it was never smooth sailing. The theater industry as a whole suffered greatly in the 1990s. Many theaters closed or consolidated or had to greatly change their missions. The Shubert mainly changed how it was structured. Current executive director John Fisher began working at the Shubert in 1997 as its general manager, when the theater was a local nonprofit owned by the city of New Haven. In 2001, the self-run management style at the Shubert ended and the city solicited bids from outside companies to manage the theater. The winner was CAPA, an organization that had created an active circuit of theaters in Ohio and Chicago. CAPA managed an impressively smooth transition, retaining key Shubert employees such as Fisher, marketing director Anthony Lupinacci and director of ticketing Sue Jacobson. Just last year, in the Shubert lobby on the theater’s 99th birthday, ownership of the Shubert passed from the city of New Haven to CAPA. “It’s been about keeping it going,” Fisher says, “trying to move forward in this day and age. Expanding our programs, developing new audiences, offering diversity. The ownership transfer from the city to CAPA will save the city millions of dollars in repair costs, and allow us to raise money from new sources. The city is still a great partner.” The Shubert’s “centennial plan” also involves major renovations to the building, from its lobby to its backstage and offices. Some of those changes—the new small “black box” performance space planned for the mezzanine area—won’t happen for a year or so. “We don’t want to close the building for more than a couple of months at a time,” Fisher says. Not when there are so many celebratory events booked, including the return of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra (with several concerts to be held at the Shubert for the 2014-15 season) and the hit musical Matilda, which Shubert audiences will get to see in a special weeklong run of technical rehearsals prior to the opening of its official national tour. The Matilda cast and crew will be in New Haven for seven weeks of rehearsals, stimulating the local economy well beyond what the hit show will bring in through tickets and downtown dining. Whereas the old Shubert was renowned for testing new shows before Broadway saw them, today’s Shubert has positioned itself as a handy place to prepare the national tours of shows that have already conquered New York. Among the post-Broadway tours that have kicked off at the Shubert in recent years are Jersey Boys, The Color Purple, Bring It On, the revivals of Hair and A Chorus Line and even a rare nonmusical tour: 12 Angry Men starring George Wendt and Richard Thomas. “These days,” Fisher explains, “a pre-Broadway tryout can add one million dollars to the capitalization of a show. So we’ve turned it around.” Then as now, you can see performances at the Shubert that you won’t see at any other theater. Fisher recalls the pre-tour “special technical run-throughs” of Jersey Boys at the Shubert. “They had three Frankie Vallis, ready to move to various productions of the show. While one Frankie was onstage, there was another in the back of the auditorium acting out the same part.” The Shubert’s known for breaking in new shows, but over the years many classics have been staged there, too. A troupe led by actor/producer Robert Mantell did Shakespeare’s King John, Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice and King Lear in rapid succession in 1915, which the Shubert bookers followed swiftly with J.M. Barrie’s The Ladies’ Shakespeare, a modern reworking of The Taming of the Shrew that reunited Barrie with the woman who played Peter Pan for him, Maude Adams. Constance Collier, Thomas Wise and Isabel Irving starred in a pre-New York run of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Mantell was back in ’17 with Richard III added to the repertory. Walter Hampden’s company did Hamlet in April 1919, followed in November by the Sothern & Marlowe company in Twelfth Night, Hamlet and Shrew. The Hampden troupe was back in ’23 with Macbeth, Hamlet, Merchant of Venice and some non-Shakespeare dramas. Sothern & Marlowe returned in December 1923 for a five-night stand of Romeo & Juliet, Merchant of Venice, Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night and Hamlet, but the more memorable Hamlet at the Shubert that month was likely the one starring John Barrymore on Dec. 17. This was the famous “psychological” version that remains one of the most famous Shakespeare productions of the 20th century. A 1949 Theater Guild production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It starred two famous actresses who lived in Connecticut for much of their lives, Katherine Hepburn and Cloris Leachman. The Shubert’s old enough to have hosted tours of the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta The Pirates of Penzance in 1915 (when the show was only about 25 years old), in the 1930s and ’40s (including some tours by the famed D’Oyly Carte Company that had originally premiered Pirates back in 1879), in 1952 (starring Martyn Green, who had just resigned from D’Oyly and was considered one of the greatest G&S performers of all time), then in 1997 and 2006 (thanks to the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players). Another Gilbert & Sullivan classic, H.M.S. Pinafore, has been seen at the Shubert in nearly a dozen different productions, including a special visit from the revived D’Oyly Carte Opera Company for the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in 2000. When the London-based company hit the Shubert stage for its first rehearsal, the chorus members kept bumping into each other while trying to adapt the show to a smaller stage. “Hey! This is where Ethel Merman fell down,” a starstruck Pinafore cast member was heard to exclaim. Evelyn Dermer is 91 years old and has been attending shows at the Shubert since she was a teenager in the early 1940s. “I had a cousin who went to every opening,” she remembers, “and he would drag me along.” They’d take a trolley car downtown, and get a seat in the second balcony for 55 cents. Later, she married George Dermer, who owned the Kramer’s Fur store in New Haven and advertised regularly in the Shubert program books. “We always attended opening nights—Row D, seats 13 and 14. It was traditional to go to Kaysey’s [restaurant] across the street after a show— one person in our group would have to run ahead to make sure we got a table.” Among the many shows she remembers attending are Follow the Girls, a 1944 musical with Jackie Gleason and Gertrude Niesen; Away We Go!, the Rodgers & Hammerstein show that post-New Haven changed its title to Oklahoma!; Ethel Merman in Call Me Madam; and Yul Brynner in The King and I. She has bittersweet memories of My Fair Lady. “We were sitting very close to the stage, and it was very obvious that Rex Harrison couldn’t remember his lines and was being prompted.” (Harrison’s anxieties backstage, which delayed the opening night curtain, have been well documented.) Dermer also recalls that one of the songs, “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight,” was cut from the show before it hit New York. She remembers recognizing the tune when it resurfaced in the film version of Gigi. “The My Fair Lady that we saw was more of a dress rehearsal,” she says. She also remembers seeing an Arthur Miller play at the Shubert where Miller showed up with Marilyn Monroe. (Dermer is unclear on what the show was. There Miller plays at the Shubert in 1955, when the playwright and the actress were first dating, and in 1960, around the time that their five-year marriage was ending.) If there was a thriving professional theater scene in mid-20th century New Haven beyond the Shubert, Dermer doesn’t remember it. “The Shubert was it,” she says. Likewise, when it was gone from 1976-1984, “if you wanted to go to theater, you went to New York.” The ’60s had seen the rise of the regional theater movement, including the Yale Rep and Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. But for a certain type of theatergoer, the lack of the Shubert left a real void. In the 1980s, Evelyn Dermer joined the board of directors of the then newly revived Shubert and helped collect and preserve memorabilia from the theater’s Golden Age. She saw firsthand the passionate need many people felt for a big old-fashioned performing arts center in the center of town, and was one of those working hard to make sure New Haven appreciated the Shubert’s hard-fought rebirth. Dermer helped support a homegrown opera company that lasted for several seasons. According to data painstakingly gathered over the years by the Shubert staff and devoted theatergoers, this one theater in New Haven has hosted the pre-Broadway tryouts of nearly 850 shows. Some of these, like George Bernard Shaw’s groundbreaking feminist comedy Major Barbara, were American premieres. Many were playing the Shubert in the midst of prolonged tryout periods that involved theaters in other cities (mainly Philadelphia and Boston). But hundreds were world premieres, shows that had never been seen by anyone except their creators before the curtain rose in New Haven. These tryouts averaged just three or four performances. It was common for the Shubert to host two or three completely different productions in a single week. There wasn’t much advertising, and no time to properly prepare an audience for what they were seeing. “Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight,” as the Sondheim song goes. Some, like the comedy-and-music revues that were popular in the 1920s, were easy for crowds to rally behind. The Passing Show of 1922, which world-premiered at the Shubert in September of that year, starred future radio star FredAllen.The1930worldpremiereofRuth Selwyn’s 9:15 Revue featured performances by Noel Coward, Eddie Cantor and Leslie Howard and songs by Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Harold Arlen. George Gershwin, who hadn’t been able to place a song in the show, reportedly saw 9:15 Revue in New Haven and complimented Arlen on his showstopping tune “Get Happy.” Encouraged, Arlen changed his mind about giving up songwriting. Some shows are perhaps best forgotten. The classic No, No, Nanette is not on the list of Shubert premieres, but its ill-fated 1927 sequel Yes, Yes, Yvette is. (It lasted just 40 performances on Broadway.) And it wasn’t just shows that “died in New Haven,” as the saying goes. In the most tragic of all Shubert anecdotes, Margaret Sullavan, the film and stage star who’d previously strode the Shubert stage in Heigh-Ho, Everybody (1932), The Deep Blue Sea (1952) and Sabrina Fair (1953), died of a barbiturate overdose in her room in the Taft Hotelon New Year’s Day, 1960, during the run of the world-premiere drama Sweet Love Remembered. Sullavan, who was just 50 years old, had been battling depression and other health problems for years. On the other hand, Neil Simon considered the Shubert a lucky place to try out a new show, though it wasn’t until he’d already scored a major hit with The Odd Couple that he started testing his new scripts in New Haven. Barefoot in the Park (starring Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley, and directed by Mike Nichols) tried out at the Shubert, as did The Star Spangled Girl (with Anthony Perkins and Connie Stevens), Plaza Suite (with George C. Scott and Maureen Stapleton), Last of the Red Hot Lovers (James Coco and Linda Lavin), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (Peter Falk and Lee Grant), The Sunshine Boys (Jack Albertson and Sam Levene), The Good Doctor (which Simon adapted from Chekhov and starred Christopher Plummer), God’s Favorite (a 1974 flop inspired by the Book of Job, directed by Michael Bennett of A Chorus Line fame and featuring Hartford-raised comic actor Charles Nelson Reilly) and, nearly a quarter century later, the pre-Broadway tour of Proposals, which happened to have two young graduates of the Yale School of Drama, Suzanne Cryer (later the “Yada Yada Girl” on Seinfeld) and Reg Rogers. The composer Frank Wildhorn became enamored with the Shubert in the 1990s, making sure tours of his musicals Jekyll & Hyde and The Scarlet Pimpernel played there, and then using the theater for the pre-Broadway tryout of his 1999 historical saga The Civil War. A massive production directed by Broadway veteran Jerry Zaks, it brought some old-school pomp and luster back to the Shubert, in an age where pre-Broadway tryouts rarely happened anymore. In 2001, the Shubert bagged the world premiere of an ambitious new musical based on one of the most famous books ever to come out of Connecticut, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The musical featured a script by Ken Ludwig (Lend Me a Tenor) and songs by country music composer Don Schlitz, but didn’t last long on Broadway. Of course, the Shubert also got a lot of shows that had already conquered Broadway without the benefit of a New Haven tryout, and had embarked on national tours with lesser-known stars. Diehard theatergoers might be more curious about what it was like to see faded 1940s film stars Nancy Kelly and Shepperd Strudwick in a national tour of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (which visited the Shubert in 1964) than they are about the well-documented Broadway performances of Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill or a major revival The star-making anecdotes didn’t stop back in the Golden Age of pre-Broadway tryouts. When a young actor named Christian Borle played the Shubert in a low-budget tour of West Side Story, he dazzled as the gangleader Riff but hadn’t yet earned enough credits to join the actors’ union. A couple of years later Borle, now a full-fledged member of the Actors’ Equity union, was back at the Shubert in a tour of Footloose, and ended up joining that show’s Broadway cast—just as the show was ending its run. Borle’s Broadway breakthrough came as the “I’m Not Dead Yet” guy in the Monty Python musical Spamalot. Later, in the same year that he was appearing on the guilty-pleasure TV show Smash, Borle won a Tony Award as the villainous Black Stache in Peter and the Starcatchers. The first national tour of that show ended this past May, which means a more economical second national tour of Peter and the Starcatchers is being readied. It’ll be built and rehearsed at the Shubert, giving some lucky actor a chance to be the next Christian Borle. Refusing to rest on its laurels, refusing to take that final bow, this hundred-year-old institution continues to create new stars and craft better shows. The show—and the Shubert—must go on.