I love the theatre. I love watching living, breathing actors perform on a brightly-lit stage to about 1,000 people sitting in a darkened auditorium. I love curtains going up, overtures, curtain calls. I love drama, comedy, and "the two most glorious words in the English language," musical comedy.

But, odd as it may sound, I love the physical structures called theatres, and none more so than the thirty-nine theatres clustered mostly from 41st Street to 54th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues known as "Broadway theatres". (There will be a fortieth theatre in about two years when construction is finished around Henry Miller's Theatre on 43rd Street.)

Even the names of theatres ring with history: Helen Hayes; Al Hirschfeld, the caricaturist; Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne; Ethel Barrymore; critics Brooks Atkinson and Walter Kerr; impresarios Sam Shubert and David Nederlander and David Belasco; Eugene O'Neill and Neil Simon; Richard Rodgers. The Palace, the grand dame of vaudeville. The New Amsterdam, "the House Beautiful", home of the legendary Ziegfeld Follies. When theatres are renamed, as sometimes they are, usually it's to honor someone of importance (Kerr and Rodgers are the most recent of this crop).

But there is the harsh commercial world to consider. Two of the restored 42nd Street theatres, the Selwyn and the Lyric, were renamed when they were refurbished in honor of corporate sponsors -- American Airlines and Ford, respectively (although the name "Ford Center for the Performing Arts" doesn't ring too falsely in the ear). And the venerable Winter Garden, home for too many years to "Cats", had a carmaker's name attached to it, becoming the Cadillac Winter Garden.

Now, the Ford Center is being renamed by its new owners (Clear Channel Communications) the Hilton Theatre. This, even though the 42nd Street Hilton recently announced plans to turn the old Liberty Theatre next door into a performance space. This is revolving door naming, all for the sake of a corporate sponsor's dollar. Even worse, two of the 45th Street theatres owned by the Shubert Organization -- the Plymouth and the Royale -- are going to be renamed, respectively, for those great theatrical names...Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernard Jacobs.

Who?

Schoenfeld is currently the chairman of the Shubert Organization. Jacobs was its president until his passing in 1996. Not that I have anything against either man -- after all, they kept the Shubert houses lit and in good repair through some hard decades for the theatre. And God knows their flagship theatre, the Shubert, is named after Sam S. Shubert, founder of the empire. But still...Sam's two brothers, Lee and J.J., for all their enormous egos, never dreamed of naming one of their Broadway houses after themselves. (They revered their older brother, who had the dream and the drive and died too young in a railroad accident.)

There are many people, living and dead, who could lay claim to the name of a Broadway theatre. Julie Harris. Stephen Sondheim. Oscar Hammerstein. Tennessee Williams. Ethel Merman. David Merrick. The list is seemingly endless. But Schoenfeld and Jacobs? Those are names, like John Cort and George Broadhurst, which will become lost in time and forgotten. Shame on the Shubert Organization for renaming these theatres. And shame on Gerald Schoenfeld, who for so long refused to rename any Shubert house, for agreeing to do this now.