Roundabout Theatre Company Unveils the Todd Haimes Theatre

The former American Airlines Theatre, the flagship home of Roundabout Theatre Company on Broadway, has been renamed the Todd Haimes Theatre. The name change, first announced in 2023, is in recognition of the company’s late artistic director and chief executive. Todd Haimes passed away, aged 66, on April 19, 2023, from complications of osteosarcoma. Roundabout’s interim artistic director is Scott Ellis.

The inaugural production at the newly renamed theater, 227 West 42nd Street, is the first Broadway revival of John Patrick Shanley’s Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt: A Parable, directed by Ellis. Home by Samm-Art Williams, directed by Kenny Leon, will close the 2023-24 season.

The first complete season at the Todd Haimes Theatre will include the premiere of Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang, directed by Leigh Silverman; the Broadway premiere of Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize- and Obie Award-winning English, directed by Knud Adams; and a new jazz-infused, New Orleans-style production of The Pirates of Penzance by W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, adapted by Rupert Holmes, choreographed by Warren Carlyle and directed by Ellis.

The theater, originally known as the Selwyn Theatre, was designed by the architect George Keister (who also designed the Apollo Theatre in Harlem) and built in 1918. For decades, it was a cinema, before falling into disrepair and finally being abandoned during a period of widespread decline in the Theater District. The urban redevelopment organization New 42nd Street took over the Selwyn in the 90s, leasing it to Roundabout Theatre Company.

Under Haimes’ leadership, the theater was renovated and the Selwyn’s historic interior restored. The number of seats was reduced from 1,000 to 750 and a penthouse lobby deck was constructed—the only outdoor gathering space of any theater in the area. It reopened in 2000 as the American Airlines Theatre, going on to present such Tony Award-winning and -nominated productions as Big River (2003), The Pajama Game (2006), On the Twentieth Century (2015), Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2016), A Soldier’s Play (2020) and Trouble in Mind (2021).

Haimes was the driving force of Roundabout Theatre Company for nearly 40 years, joining the company in 1983 at the age of 26. Haimes transformed a company struggling to pay the rent on a converted Chelsea basement into one of the leading cultural institutions in New York City. It now has five Broadway and off-Broadway spaces, presenting both classics and world premieres.