and Ira Gershwin's musical Strike Up the Band, which opened at the theater in January 1930 and ran for 191 performances over the next five months. At the onset of the Great Depression, many Broadway theaters were impacted by declining attendance, leading to many flops. The 1930–1931 season alone had six shows, including a revival of The Merchant of Venice. The season ended with Noël Coward's Private Lives, starring Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, which lasted 256 performances. In the 1931–1932 season, four successive plays closed within one month. The 1932–1933 season, with three shows, was the Times Square's final season as a live venue. The season's shows included Clear All Wires!, Foolscap, and Forsaking All Others. The play Angel, with Lenore Ulric, was supposed to have opened at the Times Square in June 1933 but never did so. Movies The theater remained dark for the 1933–1934 season, even though the play Ragged Army had been planned to open there in February 1934. The theater's owner Burgwyn Realty Corp. leased the theater to the Brandt family for use as a cinema in May 1934. The Brandts planned to operate the theater under a grindhouse format, with films running continuously. This was part of a decline in the Broadway theater industry in the mid-20th century; from 1931 to 1950, the number of legitimate theaters decreased from 68 to 30. The lease originally ran for five years. The following year, Burgwyn lost the theater in a foreclosure proceeding. The Times Square and Apollo theaters were auctioned off, and Timap Inc. acquired them in June 1935 for $110,000, subject to the existing $800,000 mortgage. The proscenium arch was infilled in 1939 when the former stage house was converted to a haberdashery, since the theater no longer needed these facilities after its conversion into a cinema. By the mid-1940s, the ten theaters along 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues were all showing movies; this led Variety to call the block the "biggest movie center of the world". The Brandts owned seven of these theaters, while the Cinema circuit operated the other three. The Brandt theaters included the Selwyn, Apollo, Times Square, Lyric, and Victory theaters on the north side of 42nd Street, as well as the Eltinge and Liberty theaters on the south side. The Times Square Theater showed action films and Westerns, and the Brandt changed the bill three times a week. Several