It is almost impossible to imagine Broadway without Gerald Schoenfeld, the hugely influential, genially opinionated chairman of the Shubert Organisation, a position that identified him at once as Broadway’s biggest landlord. Comprising 17 theatres on Broadway and one off, as well as several theatres elsewhere in the United States, the Shubert holdings allowed Schoenfeld to hold powerful sway over the shows that the American public saw, numerous British hits (Mamma Mia!, The History Boys, The Phantom of the Opera) among them.

Theatregoers do not necessarily know who controls and operates the playhouses in which they sit, but whether in tandem with the late Bernard B. Jacobs, or as sole Shubert supremo in the 12 years since Jacobs died, Schoenfeld played a considerable role in defining the epicentre of the US commercial theatre.

As often as not, Schoenfeld’s taste turned to Britain, and numerous London hits then and now ended up in New York in a Shubert-owned house. The original Broadway production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus opened in 1975 at the very venue, then known as the Plymouth, that three years ago was renamed for Schoenfeld himself. Its 45th Street neighbour, the Royale, once home to David Hare’s Skylight as well as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Song and Dance, was at the same time renamed in honour of Jacobs, the gesture proving in a stroke the importance of the two men to Broadway.

Lloyd Webber and the ascendancy of the British mega-musical played a sizeable role in consolidating the Shuberts’ fortunes during the 1980s and beyond. The Phantom of the Opera is still playing at the Majestic Theatre, a prime Shubert house, and in 2006 eclipsed Lloyd Webber’s own Cats, a separate British hit in Les Misérables, and the homegrown American A Chorus Line to become the longest-running Broadway musical ever. Lloyd Webber remembered the impresario with great good humour, remarking to the playbill.com website: “My standing joke with him was that he should play Max in Sunset Boulevard. Broadway has lost a fantastic personality.” (Ironically, Sunset Boulevard on Broadway played at the Minskoff Theatre, which is not a Shubert house.)

A jaunty-looking man possessed of an ever-glistening bald pate, the portly Schoenfeld bore more than a passing resemblance to the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and presided over his Broadway real estate like the fiefdom that it was. He could often be seen greeting notables on opening night and enjoyed an open if sometimes contentious relationship with the press.

The former New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich cited “the Shuberts’ paranoia” about that newspaper in his collection of critical essays, Hot Seat, and notes efforts made by the theatre owner to affect Rich’s responses to the shows on view.

But the two men became firm friends, and Rich was among those quick to pen an appreciation of Schoenfeld within 24 hours of the producer’s death. “His last opening was a hit, but so was the entire Shubert venture,” wrote Rich.

In fact, neither Schoenfeld nor Jacobs was related to the one-time family dynasty over which they so successfully ruled, Schoenfeld going so far as to joke in print in a 2002 coffee-table book about the Shuberts that “the only Schubert I had ever heard of was Franz Schubert, the great composer”, whose name, of course, had a different spelling. Schoenfeld was brought in to the family enterprise to be the principal company lawyer in 1957, eventually acceding, with Jacobs, to the top job after something of a power tussle saw one of the few surviving Shubert family members pass from consideration.

The 1970s saw the Shuberts under Schoenfeld and Jacobs really begin to make a mark that had to do not only with the product on offer but, over time, with often-tricky union negotiations and the state of the theatres themselves. At this point, 44th and 45th Streets — and their connective pedestrian passageway known as Shubert Alley, where the organisation’s headquarters are — put the comparatively dowdy, dreary thoroughfares of London’s West End to shame, though it wasn’t always thus. It took the wattage of such Shubert offerings as Dancin’, Amadeus and the Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby to help re-establish the side streets off Broadway itself as an international destination, after a period in which the “Great White Way” had been tarnished by crime, drugs and prostitution.

Stars played their part as well, and Schoenfeld liked nothing so much as a big name on one of his marquees — whether English (Jeremy Irons in The Real Thing, who won a Tony Award for his performance) or American (Julia Roberts in Three Days of Rain, who did not). And to those who argued, and still do, that the Shuberts were too insistently on the side of commerce over art, Schoenfeld could point to a Broadway track record that extends from Stephen Sondheim’s adventurous art house musical Sunday in the Park with George to, just recently, the Broadway bow of Billy Elliot, a region-specific British musical that was long considered far from a sure bet in New York. The list of British theatre notables who owe him a debt is long and varied but surely begins with Lloyd Webber and the producer Cameron Mackintosh and includes directors such as Trevor Nunn, Peter Hall and Matthew Warchus and the producers Sonia Friedman and Judy Craymer.

Schoenfeld was born in New York in 1924, the son of a coat manufacturer, and graduated from the University of Illinois before going on to law school at New York University after the Second World War. It was soon after that he joined a law firm whose clients included the Shuberts, from which all else followed.

Generally content to remain offstage, he did appear briefly in the 1984 Woody Allen film Broadway Danny Rose, playing — what else? — a showbiz maven and personal manager.

He is survived by his wife, Pat, and a daughter.

Gerald Schoenfeld, theatre owner and impresario, was born on September 22, 1924. He died on November 25, 2008, aged 84