The Theater at Madison Square Garden opened in 1968 as the Felt Forum beneath the main arena, and it hosted a young Mike Tyson's 14th professional fight in 1985.
The theater sits beneath the main Madison Square Garden arena and is reconfigured for each show, so its capacity and room shape can vary a lot between events. It also changes sponsor names every few years, so check the address rather than the name on a ticket.
The theater opened in 1968 underneath the arena, designed by Charles Luckman Associates and named the Felt Forum for the company president Irving Mitchell Felt. Since then it has been the Paramount, the Theater at Madison Square Garden, the WaMu Theater, the Theater again, the Hulu Theater, the Theater once more, and since February 2026 the Infosys Theater. Renamed seven times in under sixty years, which is a useful thing to know: on a ticket for this room, the name is a date stamp rather than an identity.
It is less a designed room than a mechanism. The house is curtained down for each booking, from roughly 5,600 seats to as few as 2,000, so the same address can feel like an arena annex one night and a mid-size hall the next. The proscenium is around sixty-four feet wide, the last row sits 177 feet from center stage, and because the whole thing is below grade the ceiling above the stage is low for the seat count.
Its best-documented musical artifact is early: most of the Doors' Absolutely Live was taken from two nights at the Felt Forum in January 1970. Boxing has been the more continuous thread — Mike Tyson's fourteenth professional fight was here in December 1985, and the room has carried title fights since, including Lomachenko against Rigondeaux in 2017 and Lopez against Kambosos in 2021.
Among the venues on this list it is the odd one: no landmark status, no salvaged interior, no founding myth, and it shares a concourse with an arena and a rail terminal. What it offers instead is a large audience in a room that can be shrunk to fit, reached without going outside, which is why it takes comedy tours, awards shows, international touring bills and boxing in roughly equal measure rather than developing a house style.
4 Pennsylvania Plaza, New York, NY 10001 · Official site ↗
The Infosys Theater at Madison Square Garden is a theater located in New York City's Madison Square Garden (MSG). It seats between 2,000 and 5,600 people and is used for concerts, shows, sports, meetings, and other events. It is situated beneath the main Madison Square Garden arena that hosts MSG's larger events.
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