Eric Krebs Announces Ownership & Operation of THEATER 555, Opening September 2021

It was announced today that the 160-seat off-Broadway theater located at 555 West 42nd Street (between 10th & 11th Avenues) will reopen this fall rechristened as Theater 555. Unused since the start of the Covid pandemic in March 2020, the theater was the home of the Signature and Pearl Theater Company's. Its most recent tenant was the New York arm of Upright Citizens Brigade.

Theater 555 will be owned and operated by longtime off-Broadway and Broadway producer Eric Krebs whose career has included the building and operating of the former John Houseman and Douglas Fairbanks Theaters on 42nd Street's Theater Row from 1984 until 2005. For information on rates and additional venue offerings, visit www.theater555.com.

"For years I have longed for another off-Broadway theater. During the last year, every time I rode my bicycle past this lovely theater, I wondered what its future would be. Well, now I know," Krebs quipped. "There is nothing more satisfying for me than to be welcoming new projects into a terrific intimate theater." Krebs established the 62-seat Playroom Theater on West 46 Street that hosted many projects over ten years, until it was forced to close during the pandemic.

Krebs expects Theater 555 to be available for short and long-term rentals starting in September. In addition, Krebs comments, "I have a lot of beloved projects that I have worked on over fifty years of producing. Before I vanish, I would love to see many of them as short term runs in this beautiful theater, a kind of retrospective of My Life in Art. The usage will be a mixture of commercial rentals and 'love child' personal projects."

Eric Krebs - In a theatrical career of more than 50 years, Eric Krebs has worked as a producer, a theater founder in 1974 of the George Street Playhouse, New Brunswick, New Jersey and a builder and operator for 23 years of the John Houseman Theater on Theater Row. He recently retired after his 50th year as a professor, 37 years at Rutgers, where he is professor emeritus and 13 years at Baruch College of the City University of New York. He has performed his one actor adaptation of King Lear and most recently My Father's Voice-Letters from the Ellis Island Prison and the War in the Pacific. Producing: Broadway: Bill Maher: Victory Begins At Home, Neil Simon's The Dinner Party, It Ain't Nothin' But The Blues, Electra, Avery Brooks in Paul Robeson. Current Off-Broadway productions: That Physics Show (2016 Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience) and That Chemistry Show. Also, Off-Broadway, Sam Shepard's Fool For Love, Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth, Neil LaBute's Bash, Sing: A South African and American Celebration, A Class Act, Greed: A Musical for Our Times, I Spy a Spy, Laughing Liberally, Romeo & Bernadette: A Musical Tale of Verona & Brooklyn, and many more.

www.theater555.com