Studio 54 almost always refers to the disco opened in 1977 by Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, at nights with Andy Warhol, Cher, Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson, and to a very precise idea of the city: more free, more chaotic, more mundane. Today, however, the building at 254 West 54th Street is mainly a Broadway theater, owned by the Roundabout Theatre Company since 2003, and has a problem that goes far beyond nostalgia: in almost a century it has never been really renovated.
Roundabout is carrying out a project of about $100 million to deeply restructure Studio 54 and adapt it to the needs of a contemporary theatre. The building was built in 1927 as Gallo Opera House, then became a CBS television studio in the 1950s and finally the disco that made it famous in the world. In 1998 the theater returned to space with the revival of Cabaret, after the collapse of a crane that forced production to move. That solution, born as an emergency, ended up bringing back theatrical programming into a place that in the meantime had become a piece of New York fiction.
The work will serve above all to solve certain limits of the structure. Today the audience and the stage are at the same level, a condition that forces to build temporary structures for productions and complicates technical work. The project involves the demolition of the current staging of the audience, the construction of a new inclination to improve visibility, the restoration of the orchestra pit and the realization of a permanent stage. The public spaces will also be revisited: entrance hall, bar, shopping areas and bathrooms, today insufficient for a very popular theatre.
A central part of the intervention concerns accessibility. The Studio 54 has a steep balcony, complicated internal paths and is not fully suitable for people with reduced mobility. The renovation includes a new lift that will serve all levels and the insertion of new accessible places. The overall capacity will change little, but the layout will be different: the goal is not only to have more seats, but to make the theater more comfortable and more usable, both for those who attend the shows and for those who produce them.
The most delicate point remains financing. Roundabout has already raised a substantial part of the funds through the Next Stage campaign, but to complete the operation also focuses on public resources and a change to urban rules. Since there are no lots around the theater to use directly the building rights available, the company asked the city to be able to transfer them to other sites of the Theater District. This would allow you to turn those rights into resources to pay jobs.
L’articolo The Studio 54 meets its first renovation proviene da IlNewyorkese.
