The Shubert Organization Cancels Plans to Build New Broadway Theater: 'It Got Too Complicated'

Broadway landlord The Shubert Organization has axed plans to build a new Broadway house on West 45th Street, according to Variety. The potential new venue had been in the works for many years.

“It’s not going to happen,” Robert E. Wankel, president and co-CEO of the Shubert Organization, said in an interview with his co-CEO Philip J. Smith, reports Variety. "It got too complicated."

The new venue was to be constructed just adjacent to the Imperial Theatre, in a location that is currently a parking lot. The cost to build the theater was to have reached or exceeded $150 million, which in the end, along with additional details involved with creating the theater inside a planned larger building, made the project impractical.

"It was more the complexity of the development, which is in part a cost factor, but it was also just getting too difficult to incorporate the theater into the new building in a way that made it economically feasible," said Wankel.

Broadway could most certainly benefit from a new venue, and Wankel is onboard with giving the development of a new theater another shot down the line. "Oh, sure, we would always consider it," he noted.

The most recent new venue to open on the Great White Way is renovated Hudson Theatre, current home of 1984 and upcoming home to The Parisian Woman.