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About

Completed 1913
Architect Thomas W Lamb
As an actor's
ambition was to play in a legitimate Broadway house, and a vaudeville performer's to 'play
the Palace,' a producer's ambition was to have a hit on the Great White Way. John Cort
was, like Martin Beck, a successful theater operator on the West Coast. On arriving in
New York he commissioned Lamb to bring his version of Versailles' Petit Trianon, one of
the most beautiful and most copied buildings in the world, to Broadway. Lamb's elegantly
simple neoclassical exterior accomplishes what the French original did: cloak a
dramatically-detailed, lavish interior. The Versailles theme is reinforced by a mural of a
dance in the Palace's gardens
The theater's premier production, J Hartley
Manners' Peg o' My Heart, featured then superstar Laurette Taylor. Opening on December 20,
1912, the show ran for 603 performances, an almost unheard of number at that time. It
signaled a ten year period when the Cort would routinely play host to runs of more than
300 performances, when most shows were expected to top out at about 100. The Cort has had
a successful life as a legitimate Broadway venue, leased as a television studio for only a
short time in the late '60s