Belasco Theatre

Actor Daniel Breaker was putting on makeup in his dressing room at the Belasco Theatre, on West 44th Street in Manhattan, during the 2008 run of *Passing Strange*, when he glanced in the mirror and saw an old man with white hair sitting behind him, watching. He spun around. The chair was empty. When he reported it, the house manager wasn't surprised. "You just saw David Belasco," he said.

Belasco had been dead since 1931.

He was the producer who built the theatre, which opened in 1907, and he was nicknamed the Bishop of Broadway because he dressed every day in a black cassock and clerical collar. The building he made is still ornate inside, with Tiffany Studios light fixtures, a stained-glass ceiling, and 18 murals by the Ash Can painter Everett Shinn. He liked the place so much he built himself a ten-room duplex on the roof, decorated like a Gothic church and stuffed with theatrical relics and Napoleon memorabilia. After he died, staff said they could hear parties and dancing up there. They climbed up to check. The apartment was empty and undisturbed.

The story goes that he kept his job. They report him watching rehearsals from the balcony in his priestly garb, praising performers, shaking their hands, and pinching young actresses. After a bad show, dressing rooms have turned up overturned. A disconnected private elevator that once carried him to the penthouse is said to still rattle its chains. The incidents the staff tell get specific. A bar manager felt cold air move through his sealed office while he counted money alone at night. During Belasco's birthday week, a coat-room door locked itself again and again after the bartender unlocked it, and a manager got shut out of her own office. And on July 15, 2015, a ticket taker named Adam Carpenter dressed up as Belasco's ghost to prank his coworkers. That evening his scanners died, because the plug had been pulled from the wall.

There is a second figure, in the balcony. They call her the Blue Lady, a showgirl said to have fallen down a backstage elevator shaft. In 2017, during a revival of *The Little Foxes*, Laura Linney looked up at the locked upper balcony and saw a blonde woman in a blue dress. Her reaction, she told James Corden later, was "Well, hello." The staff weren't rattled. They only asked whether the figure was female, and wearing blue.

The Shubert Organization, which has run the Belasco since 1948, puts it on the theatre's own page: Belasco haunted the building until he "was banished by the risqué production, Oh! Calcutta!" That was the 1971 nude revue. The staff say that when it closed, he came back.