New York City Children's Theater

New York City Children's Theater is a nonprofit organization (formerly Making Books Sing) that creates original, entertaining and enriching theater for young audiences and adults to enjoy together. We believe a city as culturally rich as New York needs a children’s theater that produces high-quality original productions and develops robust arts-in-education programs, serving children in all communities across the five boroughs.

Our mission is to promote children’s literacy and social development through professional theater productions and arts-in-education programs. We reach children and their communities with a wide range of programming, including full-scale productions, small touring shows, interactive workshops and in-school residencies, and engage with them in traditional theater spaces, school auditoriums, classrooms and cultural venues in their neighborhoods.

We demonstrate that engaging young people in the arts has a positive impact on their cognitive, emotional and social development, and furthers a lifelong appreciation of the arts.

Our history began in 1996, as Making Books Sing — the family theater and education program of the Tony Award-winning Vineyard Theatre. It became an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2001.

Over the last 13 years, our local and nationally recognized arts-in-education programs and professional theater productions have served over 100,000 children and adults, across all five boroughs and surrounding communities in the Tri-State area. By partnering with more than 400 urban schools, and providing subsidized tickets to over 20,000 students for our professional shows, we have increased arts accessibility for underserved communities in New York City. In addition, we have taught more than 2,000 teachers here and in California creative ways to integrate theater into their classroom instruction and distributed over 4,500 Curriculum Resource Packets and Anthologies to supplement course material.