The Music Box was originally built in 1921 for Sam Harris, a successful Broadway producer, and his partner Irving Berlin, one of America’s greatest songwriters.

Harris built the theater specifically to house Berlin’s Music Box Revue, which played for the first four years. Harris had a remarkable record on Broadway; for the first twenty-five years of the theater, only three plays ran fewer than 100 performances. The design for the theater combines Palladian and Adamesque motifs. No expense was spared; the exterior is made exclusively of limestone, a very expensive material and unusual choice for a theater facade. Its most prominent feature is a delicate colonnade, which suggests an English country house. The interior contains extensive plaster decorations and elegant niches with murals of classical ruins, a popular subject in the eighteenth century. Irving Berlin maintained part ownership of the theater until his death in 1989 at the age of 101.