All About Eve | Shubert Theatre, New Haven — The Tryout Town Where Eve Got Found Out

New Haven is where the film stops being about Margo and starts being about what Eve is willing to do. "Footsteps on the Ceiling" opens out of town, the company checks into a hotel across the street from the theatre, and in a room upstairs Addison DeWitt lays out exactly how much he knows about the girl from Wisconsin who never existed. The screenplay did not pick the city at random. For most of the twentieth century a Broadway-bound show was tested here first, and the Shubert on College Street was the room where producers learned whether they had a hit or a disaster.

It opened in 1914, seating just under 1,600, and it earned the billing it still uses: the birthplace of the nation's greatest hits. Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Sound of Music all faced their first paying audiences on this stage before New York ever saw them. The theatre closed in 1976, sat dark for eight years, and reopened in 1983 after the city bought and restored it.

Walk the block between the theatre and the corner of Chapel Street. That short stretch of sidewalk is the whole out-of-town tradition compressed into two hundred feet: the stage door, the hotel, and the distance a performer covers between the last curtain and the review.

Location: 247 College Street, New Haven, Connecticut. Photos: Wikimedia Commons, and a 1923 architectural view of the Shubert beside the Hotel Taft from the Library of Congress.