MESSAGE
| DATE | 2015-02-06 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] New Live vaudeville Theater opening in Brooklyn
|
http://www.vulture.com/2015/02/diana-ross-brooklyn-king-theater.html
Grand Dames: The Eternally Regal Diana Ross Opens Brooklyn’s Lavishly
Redone Kings Theatre
By Lindsay Zoladz Follow
-at-lindsayzoladz
386 /Shares/
Email
Print
Diana Ross on November 1, 2014. Photo: Manny Hernandez/WireImages/Getty
To get to the Diana Ross concert in Flatbush last night, I exited the Q
train at Beverley Road with a small, decently dressed pack of people who
had absolutely no idea where they were going. They asked each other
nearly in unison /which way to the Kings Theatre/ before laughing and
realizing that of course they were all headed to the same place. They
pulled over beside the entrance to the Beverley Road Q — one stop away
from the Church Avenue station where, last fall, someone began scrawling
on the pillars messages
like “Fight white gentrification of FBush” and “Keep Flatbush black” —
and consulted their phones before someone among them finally looked up
long enough to notice the dramatic, crisscrossing spotlights to their
right. With a medium no less grand than the night sky, they broadcast
their message loud and clear: This is the way forward.
From 1929 until it closed in 1977, the Kings
was the immoderately glittering crown jewel of Flatbush Avenue —
Brooklyn’s Versailles. It was built in the unholy year of 1929 and
opened about a month before Black Tuesday; many believe that had its
completion been delayed a little while longer, until after the
stock-market crash, it never would have opened at all. But it did, and
like the four other Loew’s Wonder Theatres scattered throughout the
city, it became a Depression-era emblem of the arts’ transformative,
communal power. Designed by Chicago architects Rapp and Rapp, the Kings
was a gaudily secular cathedral of American excess, where Brooklyn came
to escape, to luxuriate, to dream. “I would say that the real historian
or architectural expert would feel that this is really bastardizing
architecture,” says one man who worked on the theater in the Kings
documentary /Memoirs of a Movie Palace/, “because it was not correct
according to any style. Every effort was just made to make it as
voluptuous, as gorgeous as possible.”
Related Stories
Photos: The Most Beautiful Old Movie Palace in Brooklyn, Back From the
Brink
Theater Review: Motown: The Musical
A few days before the show that would reopen the Kings, the sold-out An
Evening With Diana Ross, the best seats in the house were going on
StubHub for $1,000. And yet, it’s hard to imagine a performer better
suited to rechristen the place; what does Diana Ross represent if not
excess, uplift, and a fairy-godmotherlike flair for turning apple juice
into Moët? (Well, former Supreme Mary Wilson might phrase it a little
more acidly
, but
still.) Last night, the largely white crowd milled about the lobby and
took in the gorgeous restoration — plush carpets, dramatic staircases,
the lavishly painted ceiling painstakingly restored to its original
colors. A politely tinkling bell indicated that it was time to take our
seats, and the curtain lifted in the Kings for the first time in nearly
four decades — revealing Ross’s 11-piece band, which got the crowd on
its feet with a lively, percussive instrumental. Soon after, our diva
emerged in the middle of the theater and, bubblelike, floated up the
aisle singing a galvanizing rendition of (what else?) “I’m Coming Out.”
She was wearing a mermaidlike, sea-foam sequined dress and a billowing,
near-parodic shawl that suggested she had walked into a fabric store,
purchased an entire bolt of tulle, and wrapped it around her body in an
effort make herself as voluptuous, as gorgeous as possible.
This performer and venue were not always so spiritually in sync: At
height of Ross’s solo fame in the ’70s and early ’80s, the Kings saw
some of its darkest days. The film industry had changed — decreased
output, the rise of multiplexes, a general distrust of glamour — and the
Kings and other movie palaces like it fell into disrepair. After a
gradual decline into B-movie screenings and dwindling attendance, the
theater finally shuttered in 1977. For decades it remained stubbornly
undemolished, surviving a series of proposed development deals that fell
through mostly because when push came to shove, nobody wanted to build
in Flatbush. But, perhaps to stay a few strokes ahead of the looming
wave of gentrification, the city and private investors put $95 million
into an extensive two-year restoration process. According to the /Times/
,
workers found a naked man asleep on the stage when they first arrived to
rip up the carpets and remove the asbestos.
Last night, though, was all class. On her great 1977 live album
documenting a tour that was also called An Evening With Diana Ross, the
Boss spends much of the show ramping up to a climactic Supremes medley,
but in 2015, she dispenses with that early, as though she would like to
get it out of the way and move onto more important things. Still, even
for its perfunctoriness and a few understandably human rasps, she sang
the songs nearly note-perfectly — that clarion, sparrowlike voice
ringing out with such stirring familiarity that a man behind me at one
point gasped to his companion, “I’m out of my skin!” In a moment when we
are dealing with the unsettlingly mortal fact that Mariah Carey can no
longer hit some of those signature high notes
, there
is something deeply, profoundly, and perhaps even existentially
comforting about the fact that Diana Ross still sounds exactly like
Diana Ross.
Supremes biographer Mark Ribowsky once wrote that the group’s genius
relied upon a “delicate camp/fantasy balance,” and this is the pinhead
on which Ross, at 70, still twirls. She has this breezy way of dancing
while at the same time saying with her expressive, silent-film-actress
eyes, “Can you /believe /I’m /dancing/?” The audience eats it up. Her
outfits were differently hued variations on the
sequins-beneath-a-cloud-of-tulle theme, as though they were the other
options — crimson, silver, canary — presented to Glinda the Good Witch
by her stylist before she finally settled on pink. The silver dress, of
course, meant disco, and Ross had the crowd worked into a froth during
the set’s highlight, the effervescent “Upside Down,” during which one
man very elegantly rushed the stage and launched into an impressive
dance routine. Though it is not spoken of as frequently as her diva’s
reputation, onstage, Ross has always had an almost Zen-like tendency to
move with the elements, to simply let things be. She regarded this
interloper much as she did the legendary Central Park thunderstorm in
1983 : gamely,
professionally, even with a degree of delight. Beaming, she let the man
dance beside her, and when he was done, even offered him a hug, much to
the visible terror of the security guards poised in the wings.
For a fittingly over-the-top finale, she played her version of “I Will
Survive” — twice. The second time, she passed the mike to her backup
singers to do some impressively spirited solos, and then invited some of
her family out onstage, including her son Evan Ross and his wife, Ashlee
Simpson
.
Though it seemed like a charming opportunity for a lip-sync joke or
perhaps a hoedown , Ross
unfortunately did not pass the mike to Simpson.
The whole thing ended with a warm, soaring sing-along of “Reach Out and
Touch Somebody’s Hand,” which gave off the feeling that Ross had just
sprinkled a heaping helping of fairy dust over the swaying crowd. Across
the street from the theater, before, during, and after the show, a
steady stream of passersby lifted phones and snapped photos of the
marquee that proclaimed, “GRAND REOPENING … WELCOME BACK, BROOKLYN.” It
was hard to tell exactly what appeared in the pictures: a landmark of
old Brooklyn successfully revived, or another ominous harbinger of a
neighborhood’s impending transformation. The show was a little bit of
magic, which means that it was impossible to say in the intoxicating
moments afterwards if $95 million worth of fairy dust could have been
better spent.
/*This article appears in the February 9, 2015 issue of /New York
/Magazine./
|
|
