Broadway’s Beloved Basement Club, Feinstein’s/54 Below, Turns 10

On June 5, 2012, shortly after noon, a bevy of cabaret and theater artists and insiders gathered in a space beneath what had been the storied West 54th Street nightclub Studio 54. The occasion was a dress rehearsal for a show that evening that would open a new venue called, reasonably enough, 54 Below. Patti LuPone was the featured act, with other Broadway and nightlife luminaries, including Ben Vereen and Justin Vivian Bond, slated to appear soon afterward.

Joe Iconis, a young composer, lyricist and performer who was part of that initial lineup, recalled the event as “a coming out for the room itself.” The bar was separated from the stage and dining tables by a curtain, which was later opened, “so there was this dramatic reveal of the room, to the people who would soon be playing it.”

It was a fittingly theatrical debut for a spot that, 10 years later, still bills itself as “Broadway’s living room.” (The venue is now known as Feinstein’s/54 Below, acknowledging a creative partnership with the veteran performer and American songbook champion Michael Feinstein that began in 2015.) On June 12, it will receive an honor at the Tony Awards for excellence in the theater.

At the time of 54 Below’s start, the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room, one of New York’s most established cabaret venues, had just announced its closure; Feinstein’s own namesake at the Regency Hotel shut down not long after. Don’t Tell Mama and the West Bank Cafe’s Laurie Beechman Theater still offered show tunes and standards, as did the jazz club Birdland. But as Richard Frankel, one of the four Broadway producers who started and still own 54 Below, remembered, “There was nothing geared towards the huge resource of the Broadway talent pool, and the continual renewal of new music that Broadway provided.”

Today, 54 Below occupies a rare perch as a free-standing club offering just that. But it faces more competition. In 2017, the Green Room 42 arrived, which, like 54 Below, features name acts, rising stars and cult favorites alongside theme shows and special events. The following year, Birdland unveiled Birdland Theater, a space that has accommodated longer runs by Broadway performers and emerging jazz artists as well as freewheeling variety shows. Other venues have continued to pop up downtown, like the East Village spots Pangea and Club Cumming, where artists generally less associated with Broadway can wax theatrical in their own fashion.

But Don’t Tell Mama’s longtime booking manager, the cabaret doyen Sidney Myer, conceded that 54 Below still “draws the best and the brightest” and called its team “creative and proactive.”

Frankel and fellow owners Steven Baruch, Marc Routh and Tom Viertel — who have produced “The Producers,” “Hairspray” and the 2018 revival of “Angels in America” — recruited the Broadway mainstays John Lee Beatty, Ken Billington and Peter Hylenski to design the restaurant and its lighting and sound. Beatty even requested a story for inspiration; Viertel spun one about Jewish hustlers who, as Frankel relayed it, sold stolen car parts during World War I, “then started bootlegging when Prohibition came, and invited showgirls and opened a speakeasy. John said, ‘Fine—I’m good.’”

For a pair of anniversary concerts on Sunday and Thursday, the club will spotlight young and emerging performers, composers and playwrights — among them the “Dear Evan Hansen” and “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series” alumnus Andrew Barth Feldman, 20, who grew up “binging YouTube videos of people at 54 Below” before starting to visit the club in his early teens. (Minors are welcome but aren’t permitted at the bar without parental supervision.)

When the coronavirus pandemic shut down live performances in March 2020, there was no guarantee the venue would make it to this milestone. Two rounds of government loans “really saved us from the abyss,” Frankel said, though he estimated that business was still down between 20 and 25 percent from 2019.

54 Below inherited its first director of programming, Phil Geoffrey Bond, from the Beechman. When Jennifer Ashley Tepper joined the venue as creative and programming director a little less than nine years ago, she took a cue from Bond’s popular “Sondheim Unplugged” series. One of her first projects was “New Musicals at 54,” which has delivered concert versions of shows such as Iconis and Joe Tracz’s “Be More Chill” and Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize winner “A Strange Loop,” now up for 11 Tony Awards, both showcased before they were produced in New York. An eclectic assortment of additional series have come to include “New Writers at 54!” and “54 Sings …,” which mostly celebrates pop music.

“A lot of these shows are done on the fly,” noted the composer Stephen Flaherty, whose musicals “My Favorite Year” and “Seussical” have been showcased at the club, which also features cast reunions and concerts of classic and underappreciated works. “You’ll have people dropping out and others replacing them, so you never know what you’re going to get, which is part of the excitement.”

Slotting such vehicles and novelty acts alongside headliners like Chita Rivera, Ariana DeBose and Charles Busch into at least two shows per night, seven nights a week, can pose a challenge, Tepper says: “A big part of my job is making sure that the crowd is different at different performances.” 54 Below has drawn what the jazz singer Nicole Henry, one of several artists brought on board by Feinstein, calls “an informed, intelligent audience. They often know more about the music than I do.”

Iconis described the crowd as “a thrilling mixture of musical theater nerds, old-time cabaret fans, tourists, intelligent artists, rich people and poor college students.” While that adds up to “an amazing cross-section of the city,” it can invite chaos. He recalled an ordeal when two young men “got falling-down drunk and progressively destructive” at one of his Iconis and Family Christmas shows, and eventually had to be chased upstairs and locked outside by performers “in various states of Christmas dress and undress,” among them “a scantily clad Santa Claus and Virgin Mary.”

Part of Feinstein’s goal has been to keep the atmosphere both comfortable and classy, such disruptions notwithstanding. “To me, Feinstein’s is not only about the American songbook; in some ways, it’s become a sensibility, a lifestyle brand,” he said.

That brand can carry a hefty price tag. In 2021, when the club announced a “Diamond Series” featuring performances by stars such as Kelli O’Hara and Laura Benanti (upcoming runs include Jennifer Holliday and Brian Stokes Mitchell) — for a starting price of $300, including a four-course meal, tax and gratuity — there was some balking online. Frankel said that the series “is really expensive, but there’s an audience that can afford it and wants it.”

Prices at 54 Below do vary widely, generally starting at $30 — and running between $55 and $85 for most headlining acts and up to $120 for the most expensive, with some premium seats priced at $175. By comparison, Birdland Theater typically charges $20 to $40, though more for certain artists; Green Room 42’s prices range from $19 to $129, with $10 going toward food and beverage. (54 Below has maintained a $25 combined food and drink minimum since opening.) At the upscale Café Carlyle, most cover charges exceed $100, often considerably, and patrons must pay an additional $90 for a two-course prix fixe meal.

The cabaret and musical theater veteran Lillias White, another 54 Below regular, said, “The club is expensive, especially for people in the theater who are out of work. I’d love to see them have a different price range for people in unions. I’d also love — hint, hint — to headline a special show on Monday nights for performers whose shows are dark on Mondays.” Actually, Birdland has had such a show for nearly two decades: “Jim Caruso’s Cast Party,” hosted by the titular nightlife stalwart.

For now, 54 Below is trying to broaden its reach by continuing to livestream numerous performances — a practice begun during the Covid shutdown — charging between $15 and $25 for access. “There are a lot of artists we lose money on, artists who don’t attract a big audience,” Frankel said. “We pay them as much as we can, and it’s a loss at the end of the night. But we do that happily, because it’s part of our mission — to keep the pipeline going.”