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The Irving Place Theatre was located at the southwest corner of Irving Place and East 15th Street in the Union Square neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. Built in 1888, it served as a German language theatre, a Yiddish theatre, a burlesque house, a union meeting hall, a legitimate theatre and a movie theatre. It was demolished in 1984.
The theater is the setting for the 2013 fictional play, The Nance.
History
The original building on the site was Irving Hall, which opened in 1860 as a venue for balls, lectures, and concerts. It was also for many years the base for one faction of the city's Democratic Party.
The facility was rebuilt, and opened as Amberg's German Theatre in 1888 under the management of Gustav Amberg, as a home for German-language theatre. Heinrich Conried took over management in 1893, and changed the name to Irving Place Theatre. The first night of the play Narrentanz (The Fool´s Game) by Leo Birinski took place here on November 13, 1912.
In 1918 the facility became the home of Yiddish Art Theater company under the management of Maurice Schwartz. By the 1920s burlesque shows were offered alongside Yiddish drama. Composer-arranger Harry Lubin, of The Outer Limits fame, was musical director of the theater during the 1920s and 1930s.
Clemente Giglio converted the theatre in 1939 into a cinema to present Italian films. In 1940 it was taken over by a group of non-Equity actors, the "Merely Players", whose productions were picketed by the theatrical unions. During World War II it presented a steady program of mixed bills of Soviet propaganda and French films, as well as weekly folk dance sessions.